


The Chemotherapy

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [17]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 28,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6115642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The yeerks are hoarding oatmeal at the school, and the Animorphs have to figure out why. What plan could possibly rely on oatmeal? Poisoning? Some kind of chemical mind control?</p><p>Finding the answer only raises more questions, and more dillemmas. As their ability to fight this war grows, Cassie has more and more doubts about what exactly they are trying to do. How much harm is justifiable in the name of protecting their people? Are the Animorphs really helping anyone? And how long can they hold onto their values and use their powers to do what's right when even Cassie has no idea what right or wrong is any more?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

My name is Cassie. I'm not very smart. I'm not good with numbers and I'm not good with words. But in my short life, I've learned a lot. I could probably make a decent living writing those 'did you know?' facts that show up in magazines.

Did you know that there is life on other planets? That there is a world where the bright sunlight gleams off a beach littered with gemstones and pierces the perfectly clear ocean water – or did, before that beach was blown up?

Did you know that penicillin, the miracle drug that sparked off the whole field of antibiotics, was discovered at least three times, but thought too expensive to develop? That it was eventually developed because the timing of the last discovery put it firmly in the middle of a war, and while it was too expensive to save human lives during peacetime, it was a small price during war to keep our soldiers alive long enough to kill more people?

Did you know that humans went to the moon as part of a massively accelerated space program as an act of war, and that developments in space exploration have been dwindling ever since?

Did you know that the first electronic computers were developed to decode enemy messages in wartime, and that the entire field of computing owes its origin to that desperate race to kill each other more effectively?

Did you know that scientific experiments show that eighty per cent of human beings, real everyday human beings from every culture and every walk of life, will electrocute a puppy to death if somebody in authority asks them to? That they'll also keep applying more and more electricity to human victims at the prompting of an authority figure; weeping, protesting, volunteering to trade places, but still pushing the button, just because the person in charge says 'please continue'?

I'd been doing a lot of reading.

I probably had a couple of library books overdue, actually, and I was trying to remember when they were supposed to be returned when I took the last corner on the way to Rachel's house and nearly ran straight into Marco.

“Whoah! Hi, Cassie.”

“Sorry. Hi.”

“So, oatmeal,” Marco said, as if that was a meaningful statement. Unfortunately, our lives had gotten weird enough that it was a meaningful statement.

“Any ideas?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said. “I was sitting at lunch today, eating that ridiculous slop the school calls food, and thinking.”

“And?” I asked.

He blinked at me. “And I was eating that ridiculous slop the school calls food,” he repeated. “In the same building where the yeerks are hoarding all this weird oatmeal? I was thinking, you know, they could just serve that up one day and nobody would even question it, even though eating oatmeal for lunch is stupid.”

“You think they're planning on poisoning students?” I asked. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Maybe there's something in the oatmeal to make students all depressed or something, so they want to join The Sharing? I don't know. But why else would they have it all there?”

That made sense. It sounded exactly like something that the yeerks would do. Drug people to poison their minds. That's basically what The Sharing did already, right, with their words and smiles and catch phrases?

We through Rachel's gate and rang to doorbell. Her little sister Jordan let us in.

Jordan was a couple of years younger than Rachel, and looked like Rachel in miniature. I don't mean that she looked how Rachel had at her age; Rachel at her age had worn khaki shorts and had the lean muscles of an amateur gymnast and gone lizard-catching with me in the river. I mean that if you looked at Rachel now and tried to imagine her a couple of years younger, you'd have a pretty good picture of Jordan. She dressed in bright colors with glitter lip gloss, kept her blond hair long and straightened, and collected those silly slap-band things that could be pulled straight but curled into a bracelet when you struck them across your wrist. She had a pale blue streak in her hair when she answered the door, which I knew must be fake or her mother would have killed her.

“Cassie,” she said. He eyes skipped to Marco and she hesitated, clearly trying to remember his name.

“Theodore,” he prompted.

“Marco. Come in.” She stood back and let us pass. “Rachel said she'd be down in a bit.”

We followed her into the kitchen, where Sara was pouring herself some juice. Sara's about eight or nine years old, I think; I'd lost track at some point. “Hi, Cassie,” she said.

“Hello, Sara.”

“What am I? Chop liver?” Marco asked.

Sara looked at him silently, then back to me. “You brought your boyfriend,” she said.

“Wait,” I said, “what?”

“Cassie's dating Jake, dummy,” Jordan said, rolling her eyes. “Rachel's dating Marco.”

Marco, beside me, made a small, strangled noise. I just shook my head. “I'm not... dating anyone...” I protested quietly.

“That doesn't make sense,” Sara told her sister, screwing up her nose. “Jake is gross. Marco is way cuter.”

“And Rachel's way cute too. Cute people end up together. Haven't you ever read a single magazine?”

“Cassie's cuter than Rachel.”

“Cassie's socks don't even match!”

“Um,” I said. I felt like I should stand up for myself, somehow, but had no idea how to push my way into the sister joust unfolding before me. I glanced at Marco for help, but he wasn't watching the girls. He was looking out into the hallway with an expression on his face that was very difficult to describe, but if I had to I'd probably compare it to him receiving a phone call that he'd just inherited a vast amount of wealth, his own network TV show, and the entire cast of Baywatch wanted to date him.

I followed his gaze and saw why.

Rachel was standing in the hallway, looking dumbfounded. I was willing to bet she'd heard the whole thing.

She strode, quickly, into the room. “Jordan, Sara, why don't you guys pick what you want delivered for dinner? Somewhere else?” she said pointedly.

Jordan looked like she was going to argue for a moment, but when she saw the look on Rachel's face she just rolled her eyes and rushed her sister out of the room.

Marco, grinning, opened his mouth. Rachel rushed forward and grabbed his jaw, pushing one finger into his cheek between his teeth to prevent him from speaking.

“Before you say a single word,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, “I want you to remember that I can turn into a bear and tear all your limbs off. And you can heal really well, so I can do that _more than once_. Do you understand?”

Marco's eyes widened. He understood.

“Good. Remember that. Keep remembering that forever.” She let him go. “So,” she said. “Soda? We only have orange.”

“Orange isn't even a flavor,” Jake said from the hall. He entered, screwing up his nose. “It's a fruit. That's cheating.”

“Jake's here,” Jordan called unhelpfully from the other side of the house.

“You mean like lemon?” Marco asked, raising a brow. “Or pineapple? Or basically everything else except cola?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I can assure you that there are absolutely no vitamins in this soda,” Rachel said reassuringly, handing a couple to me and Marco.

“Kitchen's looking good,” I noted, glancing around. Since the house had been rebuilt and Rachel's lawyer mom had managed to get quite a lot of money from the insurance company, the layout had changed. The new one was much more modern, with one of those flat glass stovetops and everything.

Rachel wrinkled her nose in mild distaste. “I can never find anything. I miss the old kitchen.”

“You crushed the old kitchen with your giant elephant butt,” Marco pointed out.

“No sense pointing fingers,” she shrugged. “It's gone.”

“Ax and Tobias are waiting on the roof, by the way,” Jake said.

“Well why didn't you say that first thing?” Rachel muttered irritably, brushing past him to charge upstairs. We followed.

Rachel opened her window to let the two birds of prey in. I leaned casually against the door in case her sisters decided to barge in while Ax demorphed and remorphed human.

“So,” Jake said. He clapped his hands together. “Oatmeal.”

We all looked at Rachel. She frowned.

“What?” she asked. “Why are you all looking at me?”

<We're kind of wondering what you think we should do,> Tobias pointed out. <About the Star Defender thing. Since Melissa's your friend.>

“Is this our mission, or their mission?” Marco asked.

Rachel bit her lip. “We don't really have a mission,” she shrugged. “I mean, they're hoarding oatmeal. We don't know why. Not really anywhere we can go with that.”

“Marco has a theory,” I said.

We looked at Marco. He explained his school lunch theory again.

<So... what?> Tobias asked. <We just break in again and destroy all the oatmeal? Burn it?>

“Set fire to the school?” Marco asked disbelievingly. “You're saying we should set fire to the school? I feel like I really should love this plan, but...”

“Burning it is a bad idea,” I said. “We don't know what's in it. The fumes might be toxic.”

<Okay, okay, but we get rid of it somehow.>

“We should tell them,” Rachel said decisively. “The Star Defenders. At least some of them go to our school, right? Like Melissa? So they're in danger too. If we can't stop the plan, at least they'll know not to eat the oatmeal.”

<I'll tell her,> Tobias said. <I don't have a human identity she can recognise me as any more.>

“Oatmeal is such a weird choice, though,” I mused. “Why wouldn't you poison the chips or something? Everyone eats chips.”

Marco shrugged.

“The Star Defenders are following up that... project pipeline thing, right?” Jake asked. “Where we think it's a drug development pipeline of some kind? Maybe it's a... a test thing, and it only works in oatmeal?”

“'Why' doesn't matter,” Rachel said. “Stopping it matters. We're not letting them poison people.”

“Okay,” I said, “how?”

<We're not sure they're poisoning people,> Tobias pointed out. <If we run off to stop something that isn't happening we might miss out on what's actually going on.>

“What other uses can you think of for hoarding vast amounts of yeerk oatmeal?” Marco asked, raisin an eyebrow.

“Tobias has a point,” Jake said. “Step one is finding out exactly what they're doing.”

“Last time we tried that, we ended up getting sucked into the nothingness of zero-space and nearly died quite a lot of times,” Marco pointed out. “I'm not saying we shouldn't look deeper. I'm just saying.”

“That did happen, yes, but it had nothing to do with the mission,” Jake said.

“Right, but now that we're talking about it, could we maybe establish some rules on that? No morphing small stuff unless we have to? It was not fun and somehow I don't think we can count on being rescued next time.”

“There should be no next time,” Ax said. “The odds against such an event are billions to one. Bill-yon-zuh. Wun-wun-wun-nuh.”

“Yeah, well, the odds were billions to one the first time, and it still happened. I can't be the only one who finds that really weird.”

I rolled my eyes. “Marco, a billion to one chance is going to show up one in a billion times. Otherwise it would be impossible. Superstitions are born from people assuming that just because something of absurdly low probability happened – ”

“Hey, hey, let's stop this train right here before Cassie starts assigning homework,” Marco said, putting up his hands.

“Oatmeal,” Jake said patiently.

Marco shook his head with a faint smile. “Oatmeal,” he said. “The problem with this mission is going to be taking it seriously. I mean, _oatmeal_.”

A car pulled into the driveway. Rachel glanced out of the window and sighed. “It's Mom.”

“Already?” Jake frowned and glanced at Rachel's alarm clock. “I thought she was working late.”

“She was. But it's Friday, and she's coming home early instead, which means that she wants a nice family dinner together because she's working all weekend. Which means that I'll have Jordan and Sara all weekend. Wonderful.”

“Fear not, Xena; we can work around your plans of looking out for Gabrielle and... ah...” Marco dwindled off.

<That one got away from you, huh?> Tobias asked.

“Who's Gabrielle?” I asked.

Marco stared at me. “Do you even watch Xena?”

“Uh... no? Wait, why do you watch Xena?”

“Because she's Xena. Warrior Princess.” He shook his head slowly. “Rachel, how about – ”

But Rachel had already gone. We followed her downstairs, Tobias and Ax lagging behind to put some respectable clothes on.

“You're home early,” Rachel was observing as we entered the kitchen.

“Yeah. It's going to be a big one, sweetie. I might have to go in on the weekend,” she said in the manner of somebody who knew there was no 'might' about it.

Rachel nodded. “The glamorous life of a hot-shot lawyer,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I hope you like take-out because the girls are going through the menus right now.”

“Well if your environmental group friends are staying then that's probably for the best,” she said, shooting us a smile. “Hello, guys.”

“Hi, Aunt Naomi,” Jake replied. I gave her a little answering wave.

“Are you staying?” she asked. “There's a phone in the hall if you need to call your parents.”

Rachel and I exchanged a glance. Her mom was being a lot more accommodating than usual. She must be planning to stay pretty late at the office over the weekend.

She had also clearly never seen Ax eat.

“Uh,” I said, “we wouldn't want to impose. We should go home.”

“Nonsense,” Rachel's mom said, “I wouldn't dream of breaking up your little environment meeting.”

We were about to protest further but Jordan came striding into the kitchen, Sara on her heels.

“I'm older and I picked Chinese,” Jordan said.

“We always get what you want,” Sara whined. “I want pizza.”

“Pizza makes you fat, you know.”

“Only if you eat the crust, duh.”

“So long as it's food and it gets here fast I don't care,” Rachel's mom announced, rubbing her temples.

“Rough day?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Impossible case. Defending somebody's sanity.”

“Did some nutcase start killing people and you have to prove he deserves to go to jail?” Marco asked, grinning.

Rachel's mom fixed him with a withering stare. “No,” she said after taking a few moments to digest what Marco had said. “A wealthy gentleman attempted suicide and his family are claiming he is insane and not able to handle his own affairs. They want to lock him up and take his property. I've got to prove that he can handle his own affairs, which would be a whole lot easier if he wasn't constantly ranting about having an alien living in his head.”

The ensuing silence was broken by Jordan. “An alien? What a freak.”

“Don't call people freaks, Jordan. But yes, an alien. He's named it Yark or York or something.”

We Animorphs all exchanged looks. It looked like oatmeal had fallen off our priority list.


	2. Chapter 2

We called our parents, grabbed a couple of pizzas (courtesy of Sara's whining) and headed back upstairs.

“A crazy Controller?” Marco asked. “Is that a thing?”

<Why would the yeerks want a mentally ill host?> Ax asked. He was using thought-speak because his human mouth was full of pizza. Full, as in he couldn't close it. Tobias and Marco each grabbed an arm and dragged him back from the remaining pizza.

“A _rich_ mentally ill host,” Tobias pointed out.

“Only so long as he doesn't act crazy,” Rachel said. “And this is acting crazy. Why would a yeerk go around telling everyone it's a yeerk?”

“Maybe... maybe he's an ex-Controller?” I asked. “Like, maybe his yeerk died in the Kandrona thing, and it made him crazy?”

“A yeerk died in my head and I'm fine,” Jake said. He paused and we all looked at Marco.

But Marco just shrugged. “It's no fun if you're expecting it,” he grumbled.

“Right,” Jake said, “I'm fine.”

“Maybe because you were only a Controller for a few days?” I shrugged. “Maybe people who are Controllers for too long start to…”

“Decline?” Rachel supplied.

Jake shook his head. “Chapman's been a Controller for a long time, but he seemed perfectly capable of reason that time he was bargaining for Melissa's freedom.”

“Maybe he was crazy before getting infested, and now he's free, but doesn't get it?” Rachel suggested, frowning.

Tobias raised his hand like he was asking a question in class, earning an annoyed glance from Jake. “Why don't we ask him?” he asked.

“Ask him?” Jake frowned.

“Yeah. Rachel's mom must know where he lives, right? We find out, pay him a visit, and do the whole 'We're andalites and need to talk to you' thing.”

We were all silent for about fifteen seconds.

“Or,” Rachel said, “we could just ask him. Give me a few minutes.” She left, taking a slice of pizza with her. The rest of us grabbed at the remaining pizza before Ax could get it.

That didn't deter him. He just started chewing on the cardboard box.

“Ax,” Jake moaned, “don't...” he looked at Ax staring at him, questioning, pizza box sticking out of his mouth, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Why can't we ever just have a nice, relaxed pizza party?” Marco asked. “Why do we always have to fight evil aliens?”

“This isn't a pizza party,” I said. “It's a mission briefing.”

“My question stands.”

“Come have a picnic in my meadow sometime, Marco,” Tobias said. “I'll make you up a nice rat and vole pizza.”

“Gee, thanks for the offer, Tobias, but I couldn't possibly eat a pizza without pineapple on it.”

“Yes,” Ax said appreciately. “Pineapple. Py-nap-pul. The tingly yellow fruit.”

“The tingling is enzymes in the pineapple trying to digest your mouth,” I pointed out. “Also, pineapple has methanol in it. Too much of it could technically send you blind.”

“Wow,” Marco remarked after a few seconds of silence. “Today Cassie's the killjoy.”

“You can heal yourself just by concentrating,” Tobias pointed out. “Why do you care if you go blind?”

Jake had apparently given up on trying to keep us on topic. He was ignoring the group at large and reading Rachel's corkboard. I followed his gaze. There were a couple of reminders up there that, after a moment's reflection, I realised were in code. Things like _Gross slugs in next locker, apply to change_ and _Check up on Mel. about gymnastics injuries_. There were a couple of pictures, including the one with Rachel and Melissa and Melissa's new cat. There were her quotes about battle and determination. _Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win – Sun Tzu_. _I am not afraid of an army of lions led by sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion – Alexander the Great_. But Jake, I realised, wasn't looking at those. He was looking in front of the corkboard, at a new photo, sitting in a little frame on her desk next to her computer. I'd never seen it before, but I instantly recognised the event, and without thinking I rubbed at the scar on my thumb, one of many childhood scars that had survived all my morphing.

Rachel was ten, and holding up one of her 'Happy Tenth Birthday!' cards as if to act as a reminder. She was grinning, mud in her hair. The party had taken place on my family's farm, mostly because of the size. Melissa and some other girl whose name I didn't recall made bunny ears behind Rachel's head while Jake and another one of her cousins by the name of Saddler leaned casually on a bench as if they were too cool for birthday photos and didn't care if they were in the picture or not. Rachel's arm was around my shoulders, and one of my hands was hidden behind my back in a way that didn't look suspicious on-camera but I knew would've been hiding my sliced-open thumb. I didn't remember the photo being taken but that I knew precisely, from who was there and where we were, the moment that it must've happened. The six of us had been playing in the forest, and in a few minutes we'd be called together with Tom and Rachel's sisters and some other kids from class to sing and cut the cake.

I remembered that the cake had been strawberry.

There were tears in my eyes, I realised. I angled my head carefully so that nobody would notice them. I didn't want anybody asking me if I was alright based on a stupid childhood photo.

Rachel trudged back into the room, and I hurriedly wiped my eyes while nobody was looking at me. Jake, I noticed, was wiping his eyes too.

“His name is George Edelman,” she declared to the room at large (but quietly enough so that only the room would hear it), “and he's currently institutionalised at the Rupert J Kirk State Mental Health Facility.”

“For talking about voices in his head?” Marco asked, frowning. “Seriously? He went to the nuthouse for that?”

“I don't think you're supposed to call it the 'nuthouse',” Tobias said.

“A house for nuts?” Ax asked, suddenly interested. “Nutututututs? Are there walllllnut-suh?”

Marco chuckled. “Sure, Ax. All kinds of nuts. Assorted nuts.” He rolled his eyes at Tobias' carefully raised eyebrow. “But that aside, it seems weird to institutionalise him.”

“The dude thinks an evil alien lives in his head,” Jake pointed out. “I mean, we know the aliens are real, but they don't.”

“Maybe we should all move into the Rupert J Kirk State Mental Health Facility,” I mused.

“Thinking he's crazy, sure,” Marco said. “But crazy usually means fired and homeless. There are actual violent people who can't get into those places. This seems like a pretty minor thing to get locked up for.”

“His family want him institutionalised permanently,” Rachel said. “Mom says it's an underhanded scheme to discredit him and secure their control of his assets.”

“Ah,” Marco said, nodding sagely. “Money.”

Jake sighed. “So I guess we have to break into a mental institution to talk with an eccentric rich man who claims that an alien is living in his head so we can garner secrets on his control of his own body and undermine a secret invasion.”

Rachel nodded. “So... tomorrow?”


	3. Chapter 3

“Ah, yes,” Marco said thoughtfully, looking up at the building. “I always knew I'd end up here.”

The Rupert J Kirk State Mental Health Facility was a two-story square of red brick with a big glass front door, a well-manicured lawn, a nice fountain and several lawn chairs out the front. It looked a lot like an old folk's home. Or perhaps an aged apartment building. There were only a few random details that marked it as anything else. The discreet bars on all the windows, for example. The fact that the big front doors were set up two in a line, like a kind of airlock, to prevent one set opening and letting people just run in or out. The huge chain-link fence surrounding the facility, with two lines of razor wire along the top. Other than that it looked kind of nice.

We were around the side of the building, far enough away from the front gate that the person standing near it with a clipboard wasn't looking at us funny.

“Okay,” Jake said, “we all know the plan?”

<I do the talking bird routine to find George,> Tobias said from his perch on top of the fence. Unlike Ax, he wasn't in human morph.

“And be careful,” Rachel said. “The yeerks probably don't have an interest in a place like this, but we can't be sure, especially if one of their own ended up here.”

“That yeerk has to get to the Pool somehow,” I agreed.

“Jake and I go via the front desk and see if we can talk the location out of the staff,” Marco said.

“Once Tobias or Marco and Jake have a location, we wait for Eidelman to get isolated, then Ax and I go in to talk to him,” I said. “Ax talks if we can get an Andalite in safely; otherwise I do it. Rachel gets ready to bust in as elephant if a rescue is needed.”

Jake nodded. “And Rachel, remember, this isn't a yeerk facility,” he said. “There are innocent people here, okay?”

“I know, Jake, I'm not an idiot.”

“Well... good.”

<I'm off to be a pretty talking bird,> Tobias said. <I'll be back with our resident Controller.> He took off.

“Not if we find him first,” Marco muttered. “Come on, Jake. There are tons of people here. Bird-brain hasn't got a chance of beating us.”

“It's a race, now?” I heard Jake ask quietly as he jogged after him, toward the front gate.

“Boys,” Rachel said. She rolled her eyes.

“Boys,” I agreed.

“What about boys?” Ax asked. “Boy-suh?”

“They're dumb and competitive and can't stop trying to get on each others' nerves,” Rachel said.

Ax frowned down at his own body.

“Not you, Ax,” Rachel said. “You're cool.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It's just human boys who are dumb.”

“I am... very confused.”

“It's simple,” Rachel said. “Marco's trying to get on Tobias’ nerves by trying to do his job better. But he can't. Because Tobias can fly and is diplomatic and is actually a nice person. Whereas Marco is a toad who thinks he can joke his way past somebody used to guarding the mentally ill.” She glanced significantly towards the gate, where Marco was explaining something animatedly to the gate guard. The gate guard had her arms crossed, clipboard firmly pressed against her chest.

“Yeah, but Tobias is a bird,” I pointed out. “I mean, I know this is a facility for the mentally ill, but it's pretty unlikely that they all just hallucinate random stuff. I don't know if Tobias can sell random-talking-bird, and Jake is at the gate too. He'll get them in.”

The woman was looking at her clipboard by then, while Jake talked. That had to be a positive sign, right?

<Got him,> Tobias said, swooping back down to land on the fence. <Second story, third window back.>

“Are you sure?” I asked, slightly put out.

<Am I sure, she asks. Of course I'm sure. He's playing poker with a couple of other guys. Window's open but barred; an osprey should be able to squeeze through but I'm not sure what they'll do when they see you.>

“Then we'll try to not be seen,” I said. Ax and I walked off to find an alley to morph in.

I would be going in as an osprey, with Ax as a cockroach clinging to my back. This was because I could 'pretty it up', as Marco put it, if I needed to demorph, whereas Ax was going to look like something out of a nightmare no matter what he demorphed from, so it made sense to make me the bird. Ideally, we'd be able to demorph in private and Ax could speak with Edelman, but if we couldn't find anywhere to hide an andalite then I'd need to do it and convince Edelman that I was an andalite in morph.

Contingency plans. See? We were learning.

I picked up the cockroach as gently as I could in my beak and placed him carefully on my back, sheltered by some feathers. <You ready?> I asked him.

<I have a steady grip on your feathers, Cassie.>

<Good. Let's do this.> I took off and flew over the fence, half-expecting to slam into some kind of futuristic force field – which was stupid for a number of reasons, not least because Tobias had already flown in just fine. The windows were similarly not electrified or defended by futuristic space technology. We'd spent way too much time breaking into alien stuff.

I landed on the windowsill. It was, indeed, open. The room was some kind of lounge. Three men inside played cards. I squeezed through the bars while they weren't looking and hopped to the floor.

It then occurred to me that I didn't know which one of them was Mr Edelman.

Okay, so we hadn't planned for _everything_.

There were two doors in the room, both thankfully ajar; one led into a hallway, the other into a bathroom. I made for the bathroom before anybody could see me, checked to make sure there was enough space behind the door to fit an andalite, and gave Ax the all-clear to demorph.

He was, naturally, a mess of fur and chitin about half the size of a human when somebody came in.

The man backed into the sink opposite and stared. Ax, who I don't think had any usable senses at that moment, continued to shift, to change, to grow. And I, a random bird, stood awkwardly next to him, wondering what exactly I was supposed to do if the man attacked him.

<Um,> I said, <we're looking for George Edelman?>

“You're not real,” the man told Ax firmly, apparently under the assumption that the strange shifting mass in front of him was talking and not the bird – which was probably a sensible assumption, under the circumstances.

<That's right,> I said awkwardly. <We're not real. Sorry to startle you. Could you get George for us, please?>

Not taking his eyes from Ax, the man nodded once, and backed out of the room, closing the door firmly behind him.

I hoped we hadn't set back his recovery or anything.

Ax had feet, and eyes, and was basically all andalite by the time the door opened again. I guess it said a lot about my life that I assumed that wouldn't be unsettling. Apparently I was wrong, because the first thing that George did upon entering was shift the broom he was carrying in front of him, defensively, like some kind of barrier. Ax kept his tail low, seemed to take a moment to realise he was dealing with a human, and raised his hands.

“Andalite,” George said.

<Yes.>

“I expected _them_ to come for me eventually. Had to try anyway. I don't know why _you're_ bothering.”

<I, ah... 'come in peace'. I wish to talk, Mr Edelman.>

“Because your people sure are known for _talking_.”

<With respect, Mr Edelman, I do not have time to listen to the various yeerk lies you are ready to throw at me. You were a Controller, correct?>

“Still am,” he said. Ax raised his tail slightly, and George raised his broom.

<Yeerk,> Ax hissed.

“He's sleeping right now,” George replied. “Can I take a message?”

<Yeerks do not – >

“A figure of speech, it's a figure of speech. What do you want, andalite? I assume you would have killed me by now if that was your intention, and probably half the hospital with me.”

<I need to know why your yeerk is... sleeping. I need to know what happened.>

“Oh, that.” George lowered the broom and gestured dismissively with one hand. “He's insane.”

I hadn't been expecting that answer. Neither, apparently, had Ax. <Insane?>

“Well, they don't tend to lock healthy people up in here,” George continued, very slowly, as if trying to explain something complicated to a small child.

<Mr Edelman,> I broke in, <what happened to your yeerk?>

He glanced around, looking for me, and his eyes eventually settled on the very out-of-place bird of prey sitting on the floor. “You don't know,” he said, in the tone of somebody realising something. “It wasn't you? The whole thing was just some kind of... of biological accident?” He laughed out loud.

<What? What don't we know about?>

“The oatmeal! You don't know about the oatmeal?”

Ax and I looked at each other, then back to George.

“We didn't realise it at first,” he said, shaking his head. “I don't know where... I don't know how it started. But, you know that time you guys destroyed the Kandrona? A lot of people died. The yeerks starved, and we... well, I hope some smart ones shut up and got out, but anybody who broke down anywhere public, who couldn't be hidden... anyway, the point is, not everyone died. Not everyone. Some couldn't get to a Pool within three days and... well, everyone thought they were going through the fugue; they shoved the hosts in cages and waited until they could be reinfested. But the yeerks didn't die. They... they wouldn't die.”

<They did not need Kandrona rays?> Ax asked, disbelieving.

“Exactly. Everyone was so excited. But there were... side effects. Actually, it's the side effects that made it obvious what it was.”

<And it was... oatmeal?> I asked, also disbelieving.

“Yes,” he said. “But only the maple and ginger flavor. And only the instant kind.” He shook his head solemnly. “Instant maple and ginger oatmeal – the scourge of the Yeerk Empire.

“It's addictive, you know, for yeerks. Horribly addictive. I've seen humans addicted to drugs, but this... it builds up and eats away at their minds, bit by bit. Until they can't hold it together enough to maintain control; until they can't...” His face twitched. “Give me a moment, he's going to make a bid for...” his face twisted into a snarl. “Andalites,” he hissed, venemously. “In the sky, in the songs. They're coming, with those grey ones, and I have to warn her, have to... argh!”

George grabbed his hair with both hands, broom clattering to the floor, and dug his nails into his scalp.

“Control is intermittent,” he continued in a more normal tone. “My family, money-grubbing rats that they turned out to be, are right about one thing – I can't conduct board meetings in this state. But since he no longer requires food, there is little to be done to resolve the situation.”

<Can we... help... in any fashion?> I asked.

“I doubt it.” He bent to pick up the broom, exposing the back of his neck to Ax for a couple of seconds – which, I admit, was a much more courageous gesture than I would've made in that situation. “If that's all? I'm winning at poker.”

<Right, of course.>

And George Edelman, rich businessman with an insane alien in his head, gave a short nod to the blue centaur and little osprey standing awkwardly in the bathroom, and went to finish his game of poker.

<Well,> I said. <Oatmeal.>

<Indeed.>

<It seems that they weren't stocking it to use on humans at all,> I noted.

<It would appear not.> There was a thoughtful edge to Ax's tone. <It would appear that they are attempting to keep it away from their own.>

“This is fantastic!” Marco exclaimed, his face lighting up.

“A crazy yeerk is fantastic?” Rachel frowned.

“One? Maybe not. But this oatmeal thing is very clearly a big problem. There must be... dozens, surely. How are they supposed to cover that up?” He paced back and forth in front of a tree, apparently oblivious to the tree root we were all hoping he'd fall over. We had gathered in Ax's meadow to discuss the issue.

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure they would've just killed Edelman if that was going to be a problem,” Rachel pointed out. She was sitting on the grass, apparently immune to mere mortal concerns like grass stains, idly snapping a twig into tiny pieces. “That's what they did with the Kandrona thing.”

“It might not be a problem for them _now_ ,” Marco pointed out, “but if we find a way to help things along...”

“To make too many for them to handle,” Rachel continued, excitement flaring in her eyes.

<Give them too much to handle, too fast,> Tobias agreed. <Exactly like the Kandrona thing.>

“The difference between the Kandrona thing and this,” Jake said quietly from his position leaning casually against a tree trunk, “is that these hosts? Edelman and the others? They'll never be free. These yeerks can't be starved out. They're here to stay.”

We were all silent for a few seconds before Marco had the courage to ask, “Say, Tom hasn't been snacking on – ”

“No,” Jake said. “Not unless he's doing it secretly. He eats toast, normally.”

I bit my lip. It seemed harsh to even think it, but it occurred to me that there might be, well, some advantages to the Tom thing. Tom stopped the lives we were trying to save from being an abstract concept.

“Chemotherapy,” I said. The Animorphs all stared at me.

<Uh, Cassie?> Tobias prompted politely. <We're gonna need more than that.>

“Right. We're discussing the possibility of using this oatmeal as a weapon, right? Like a kind of antibiotic against yeerk infection. Except it's really more like chemotherapy. See, when people get cancer, there are a few ways to treat it. If you can't cut it out, then another option is poisoning it – chemotherapy. But the thing is, cancer cells? They're still human cells. Stuff that hurts cancer also hurts the rest of the body. The art of chemotherapy is the art of trying to poison the cancer more than you poison the rest of the body, to slow it down before it kills the patient.” I looked around at our little group. “That's what we're doing. Yeerks are more like an infection than a cancer, but this treatment is more like chemotherapy. It hurts them, it hurts us. The question is: does it hurt the infection enough to be worth it?”

<Yeah, but in chemotherapy, the patient usually gets a say,> Tobias pointed out. <Do we have the right to make this decision for these people?>

“Do we have the right to leave them as slaves with no freedom as opposed to giving them some freedom?” Marco countered.

<Temporarily. But they'll be trapped, even after we win – >

“After we win? After the glorious andalites finally get off their butts and save us? Sure, I see that happening soon.”

Ax cut in. <The andalite military is unmatched. We will prevail.>

“Ax, we just came back from blowing up a continent, didn't we? I mean, I wasn't there for the action, but that strikes me as a last-ditch kind of plan. We have to be realistic here. We see an advantage, we have to take it.” He glanced at Jake. “Look, it shouldn't be too hard to keep Tom out of this.”

“Just not other brothers and sisters and parents and children, huh, Marco?” I asked. “So long as the one that one of us is related to is safe.”

Marco blinked at me. “Cassie, you've suggested putting lives on the line to protect Tom before. Don't make me out to be the bad guy.”

“Defensive action is one thing, Marco, but you're talking about actively going out there and poisoning people. I'm not saying it's not an option, I'm saying we have to think these things through. This isn't simple self-defense – ”

“Yes!” Marco snapped. “Yes, it is! And I'm not talking about drugging or poisoning people, okay? It's _oat-frickin'-meal_. You can buy it at the _supermarket_.”

“You can buy peanuts at the supermarket, too, they can still kill people, and if you do it that's still murder,” I shot back.

“We could have our lives back!” Rachel burst out. She looked... pale. Much less together than normal. Her nails were digging into her palms.

“We could have our lives back,” she repeated more quietly. “Think about it. We keep saying, we'll show the world, we'll bring this fight into the open, but... if this oatmeal thing takes off? We don't _have_ to. Nobody knows who we are. Or who the Star Defenders are, or who the chee are, or who... other people in this fight are. If Controllers suddenly regain control, start telling people about the yeerks, if all this comes out? The 'Andalite Bandits' can just fade away. We won't need to fight any more, won't need to morph any more,” she said, glancing at Tobias. “Well, not for battle, anyway,” she added, glancing at me. “I mean, sure, there'll be aliens and stuff. And if the military needs help, whatever, that option's still open. But...”

“But we have a way out,” Marco finished quietly. He paused for a moment, and in the silence, we all let that sink in. Then he cracked a grin. “I dunno, I'd hate to miss out on all the wealth and fame of being known as one of the first humans with real life superpowers.”

<First?> Ax asked. <You are expecting more?>

“I'm sure we'll invent morphing on our own _eventually_.”

I met Jake's gaze, and saw my own conclusions reflected in his eyes. The world didn't need to know. Our parents didn't need to know. His brother, his friends... I would never have to explain to my grandmother that I had a body count higher than many infantry units. Rachel could go home and babysit her sisters like she was supposed to. Tobias could give up his morphing power and be an ordinary kid again. Marco would never have to explain to his father that he'd drowned his own mother in the ocean.

“Vote,” Jake said, as if there was any doubt about the result.


	4. Chapter 4

Tobias was still unconvinced, but the vote wasn't even close. Five to one.

“Okay,” Marco said, “so the next question is, how do we take advantage of this oatmeal thing? Do we just start force-feeding people oatmeal?”

<That may be difficult to accomplish on a large scale,> Ax pointed out. <While I am certain this oatmeal is delicious, Controllers who are not currently addicted are likely to resist.>

“What about the yeerks?” Rachel asked. “Can't we just, like, dump it in the Pool?”

I shook my head. “Probably wouldn't work,” I said.

“Why not? Yeerks have to eat, right?” Rachel glanced at Ax for confirmation.

<Yeerks absorb chemicals through organs known as osmosis nodes,> he confirmed. <They should be able to ingest oatmeal.>

“Maybe,” I said, “but we have no reason to believe that whatever is getting them is in the oatmeal. I mean, it might be. But it could just as easily be a human byproduct.”

The Animorphs blinked at me. I sighed.

“Digestion is complicated,” I explained. The majority of what people eat never actually gets inside them.”

“Isn't being eaten the definition of being inside someone?” Marco asked.

“No, things in your digestive system aren't inside you.”

“What?”

I took out a coin and showed it to him. I put it in my hand and closed my fingers around it, completely covering it. “Is the coin inside my body?” I asked.

“Oatmeal?” Jake prompted gently.

“Right. Well. Some chemicals need to get broken down by saliva to get into your bloodstream. Others are released by acids in the stomach. Some are only released when stuff gets broken down in the intestines by bacteria that live there, and what bacteria you have determines how nutritious your food is. So all that has to happen just to get the chemicals into the blood, and after that, there's the liver. The liver breaks down some chemicals into other chemicals. For example, anti-freeze is hardly poisonous at all, but if you drink it, your liver thinks it is and breaks it down – and it breaks it down into chemicals that _are_ poisonous. It's entirely possible that the yeerks are addicted to some liver byproduct. Or something in the oatmeal that only becomes dangerous in the saliva, or the stomach, or the intestine, or the blood itself. There's no reason to think the oatmeal is dangerous to them directly. I mean, it might be, but we can't bank on it.”

“Do we know anything about it?” Jake asked.

I shrugged. “It can cross the blood-brain barrier.”

“Does that narrow things down?”

“Not really. I'll check the ingredients list on the oatmeal, but I really don't know enough to learn much.” I was no chemist. Besides, how was I supposed to know what would affect yeerks, and how? It had taken the _yeerks_ by surprise.

“Okay, so not the Pool,” Rachel said, “but what about the people in the cages? They won't have yeerks in their heads. And they're probably all well aware of the problem.”

Marco raised his hand. “I vote for not going to the Yeerk Pool,” he said. “I mean, isn't the whole advantage of this that we can do something without dying?”

<Also, what yeerk is going to get into the head of someone who just poisoned themselves?> Tobias asked. <The yeerks would have no use for them. If our aim was to kill a bunch of helpless people in cages, there are easier ways to do it.>

A kind of dejected silence settled over the group.

“Ax?” Jake asked. “You know more about yeerks than anyone. What do you think?”

<I do not think that they would necessarily kill any hosts we infected,> Ax said, <but they would isolate them until they had metabolised the substance. This chemical could have the potential to be a potent weapon, but I am not sure that it is one that we can control. Allowing the addiction to run through their ranks may slow them down, and we can use that to our advantage, even if it cannot be applied directly. It could cause quite a lot of difficulty for the yeerks.>

“It has,” I said suddenly, remembering. “When we were doing the underwater shark thing, a Controller found me crouched in a corner in pain. He… I think he thought I was addicted.” I bit my lip.

“And you didn't mention this until now?” Marco asked.

“I was a little busy trying not to get discovered. It didn't seem important at the time. But I think they'd lost people, enough people for it to be considered a severe inconvenience.”

“And yet from out here in the non-yeerk world, we didn't notice a damn thing,” Marco observed. “They're getting good at covering their tracks.”

“Ax,” Jake said, “that thing Cassie said about it probably not working directly on yeerks. What are the chances it would, do you think? If we dumped it in the Pool?”

<I do not know, Prince Jake. I am not a chemist and I know nothing of yeerk biology – or of oatmeal, for that matter.>

<Do the yeerks?> Tobias asked suddenly.

Marco stopped pacing, left heel about an inch from the upraised root I was watching. “What do you mean?” he asked.

<Do the yeerks know what's causing the problem in the oatmeal? I mean, maybe they do, and maybe they know how it works. But if they _don't_ , then sure, it would be better to actually addict them if that's the plan... but even if they just think they're addicted...>

“Visser Three can't have a large proportion of his soldiers go oatmeal-obsessed and insane on him,” Jake continued, understanding. “If we dumped that stuff in the Pool and he thought they were infected...” he looked to Ax for confirmation.

Ax gave a single nod. <Visser Three is ruthless. He would sacrifice them. They would need to be replaced.> His eyestalks curled in a manner that suggested he was considering something. <They would also need to drain and decontaminate the Pool,> he added. <That would not be a deadly emergency as they could simply bring in smaller Pools, but it would be... disruptive.>

“Plan 'keep the yeerks on the run' is back on?” Rachel grinned. “Love it.”

“Tobias, do you have an entrance for us?”

<Best one for us? Probably the McDonalds'.>

“Excuse me?” Rachel asked. “There's a Yeerk Pool entrance at McDonalds'? And we didn't notice?”

<Well, you eat at the McDonalds' near your place. It's at the McDonalds' near Truman.>

“So if we eat at Rachel's McDonalds' then we're not supporting a yeerk business?” Marco asked, raising an eyebrow.

<No idea. Anyway, the entrance is in the freezer. You walk in and order a Happy Meal with Extra Happy, go round the back, and a staff member lets you through.>

Marco snorted at the lame happy meal joke. Rachel rolled her eyes.

“We need a way to get a whole bunch of oatmeal down there,” I pointed out. “Somehow I don't think they'll want people moving the stuff about near the Pool. We need a plan of attack.”

<So a scout mission?> Tobias asked.

“I can't do tomorrow,” Rachel said. “I am running out of ways to skip out on my sisters.”

Jake nodded. “Monday after school work for everyone?”

“Sure thing.”

<Yes, Prince Jake.>

“Aye aye, Fearless Leader.”

<No problem.>

“That works,” I said. I'd have to do a couple of chores Sunday instead to fit it in, but that was no problem.

“Great. Good work, everyone.”

The meeting broke up and people drifted off to morph and head home. Tobias went out to find something to eat before it got dark. I hung back.

“Ax?” I asked.

<Yes, Cassie?>

“How do you feel about this? I know you don't like to give your own opinions on these things because it's not very andalite and all, but... how would andalites handle this?”

Ax was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, <I am not aware of this particular scenario ever arising in andalite strategies. Yeerks are... biologically resilient. There are... rumours of exploiting weaknesses but... well, this plan is the equivalent of attacking the Pool with an explosive or some such device, yes? The fact that we are attacking them with biology instead of physics is not a particularly relevant detail, when you think about it.>

I looked hard at him. He avoided my gaze, which is hard to do with four eyes. Something was troubling him, but it didn't seem to be the mission. Probably some obscure andalite thing. I didn't press him.

“You remember Leera?” I asked.

<Yes, of course.> It hadn't been very long ago.

“Did we do the right thing?”

<By saving the Leerans?> he sounded surprised. <I admit I have... reservations on the flippant ways in which the upper levels of command seem to treat our laws but – >

“Not the Seerow's Kindness thing. The part where we blew up the entire land mass of a planet. That's... that's going to change the ecosystem pretty drastically.”

<Probably. But Leerans are a resourceful people. They will prevail.>

That wasn't what I meant. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I guess you're right. Thanks, Ax.” I wandered out of the meadow, into the trees, to turn myself into another of nature's children and fly away.

It probably would've looked a lot more solemn if I hadn't tripped over that damn tree root and fallen on my face.


	5. Chapter 5

I finished scrubbing out the last empty cage and stood up, rubbing my hands on a towel. I was trying to get the Rehabilitation Center in as good order as possible so that I'd have Monday afternoon free. I hosed it out with clean water, watching the bubbles move along the floor toward the drain. The sharp smell of the detergent had been the nasal equivalent of white noise to me for years, although I knew other people and animals generally hated it. Something in their sensory system knew that soap was basically poison. Technically, that wasn't its job – soap was supposed to make things dissolve more easily – but one of the things that it dissolved was the outside of cells.

Which reminded me of my other job. One of the little satchets of oatmeal that we'd taken from the school sat on the bench. Next to it was another satchet, same brand, different flavor. I sighed and got out a notepad and pen.

Then I started making lists of ingredients in one satchel but not the other. Even as I did it I knew it was probably pointless. Biology is _complicated_. It could be that all of the individual ingredients in the maple and ginger oatmeal were safe, but two or three combined were not. If could be that the toxic agent was in all oatmeal, but the other flavours had something that rendered it harmless. It could be that the problem wasn't on the ingredients list at all, but was factory contamination of some kind.

Of course, if I was a yeerk trying to weed out this kind of problem in my invasion force, I wouldn't even bother trying to find the problem or root out the addicted. I'd just take a few of my nifty spaceships and destroy all the factories that made that flavour and blame it on gas explosions or something. Let the supply die out.

But my job was to do the opposite, and that meant that finding out exactly what was going on could only help.

The desk itself was wooden underneath, with a steel surface. Steel was a lot easier to keep clean than wood was, and that was important in a place full of sick animals.

I imagined termites moving through the wood of the underside of the desk, munching little tunnels and letting that wood be their entire world. I knew there weren't termites in the desk – we were careful to keep the barn termite free. But I imagined them all the same.

“Hey, kid.”

I jumped. My dad was standing in the doorway, leaning against the door frame. He glanced at the oatmeal stachels on the desk; I brushed them out of sight – I was _pretty_ sure my dad wasn't a Controller, but I wasn't _completely_ sure.

“Counting calories?” he asked.

“Listing additives,” I shrugged.

He raised an eyebrow. “You're not going to make us start eating all fresh organic produce from farmer's markets are you?”

“Hey, that couldn't make your cooking _worse_ ,” I teased him.

He just shook his head. “Barn looks great.”

“The environmentalism group is doing a thing on Monday,” I explained. “I thought I'd, you know, get ahead on chores to free up the time.”

He came in and dragged a stool over to sit next to me. “You've been spending a lot of time with this environmentalism group,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said cautiously.

“You've made some pretty good friends, huh?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

He nodded. “They are friends, though?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean... you're a hardworking kid, Cassie. You always have been. With school and the Center and this club... I just want to make sure you're having some fun, too. Sometimes it's like you're trying to carry the whole planet on your shoulders.”

“I'm fine,” I said. I tried a smile.

He didn't look convinced. “I know you don't want to talk to that counsellor any more,” he said, “but there are other options, you know. We could get somebody else. Or you could, horror of horrors, talk to your father.”

I think it was meant to be a joke. But I just pressed my lips together, trying not to cry. I would _not_ cry. My dad watched me for a moment, then nodded to himself.

“Alright. Well, I'm here.” He stood up to leave.

“Dad?” I asked. My voice cracked.

“Hmm?”

“If you had to wipe out, say, all the hawks in the world to protect humanity, would you?”

He frowned at me. “What?”

“You know, hypothetically. Or all the birds. What if you had to choose between humanity, and every bird in the world?”

“I don't...”

“Or, say, every terrestrial species on the planet. If you had to get rid of all the land on Earth to save humans. Would all those species be worth it? I mean, what makes us so great?”

“Ah. Is this about agriculture?” He sat back down.

I shrugged. “Look, my whole life I've been saying life is important. And a mouse is more important than a carrot, and a human is more important than a mouse. And yet humans do... this.” I gestured with one hand to encompass the barn of wounded animals. “We do this whole thing like... like what's best for us is best all over, because we have sentience and we have intelligence. But aren't we just saying that because we have intelligence and sentience? I mean, if birds were stronger than us then they'd probably say that flight is the best determinant of the value of a life.”

“Well I don't think the birds would have the intelligence to say – ”

“You know what I mean!”

“I do. Aren't... aren't you a bit young to worry about this sort of stuff?”

I laughed out loud at that. A bit young! The girl who had ripped throats out with her teeth was a bit young to worry about whether what she was doing was right or not. I wished I'd had an answer when I was younger. It would be nice to know whether blowing up the land mass of an entire planet to save a sentient species was a good thing _before_ I'd done it.

“It just... sometimes I wonder, are all our morals just a more fancy form of 'might makes right'?”

“Yes, that sounds about right.”

I blinked at him. “But... but that's...”

My dad sighed. He reached into his pocket and took out a quarter, which he slid across the desk towards me. “How much is this worth?” he asked.

I blinked at it. “It's a quarter. It's worth twenty-five cents.”

“Is it? It has perhaps a few cents' worth of metal in it. In fact, if I wanted to use the metal for anything, smelting it would cost more than the value of the metal. It's worth less than nothing.”

“Or,” I countered, “you could use the metal to buy something that's worth twenty-five cents.”

“Yes. I could. I could to the same thing with a signed piece of paper, or numbers in a computer. The metal isn't even necessary. And that's because we've agreed on the value of a quarter, or of those numbers. They don't have any objective use alone, but our belief in their value has given them objective value by changing the way we behave with them. I'm sure you're familiar with the difference between objective things – things that exist, that are real, whether or not we believe in them – and subjective things, things that do not exist outside our minds, that might be true for one person and false for another?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

“Money is something in the middle. It's something that we call an intersubjective reality. Something that exists only in our minds, but exists in so many minds that it's a part of our society and can have a profound influence on the world. Money, nations, companies, political systems, justice, honor, morality – all of these are ideas, and they live and die with people. I think the problem you're running into here is that you're trying to reason about morality as if it was an objective reality, instead of an intersubjective reality.”

I laughed hollowly. “So you're telling me that morals aren't real.”

“Aren't they? The value of this quarter is real. America is real. The pet food company that gives the Center most of its funding is real.”

“That company's an actual place,” I pointed out. “It objectively exists.”

“So if the building burned down, the company would stop existing?”

“Well... no...”

“The building objectively exists. The company, the money it has, its ownership of the pet food made in its name, and the laws that protect it? These are all intersubjective realities. And they can't be reasoned about in quite the same way as objective realities can, not if you're a rationalist. They can be reasoned about, but differently.”

“So how am I supposed to reason about morals?” I asked. “How am I supposed to know what's _right_?”

“Well... there are two broad avenues that people take. The first is, you could get a religion.”

I blinked at him. “I'm being serious, Dad.”

“So am I. There are two major ways to solve your problem, and the easiest way is to treat morals as if they _were_ objectively real by assigning and not questioning them. This is called moral absolutism – right is right, wrong is wrong, and while some people might quibble over the details of what belongs in what category, they treat the categories as if they were objective things. The normal way to do this is to take somebody else's morals and say 'okay, whatever this guy says is right or wrong is objectively right or wrong', and then just never question why you should listen to that guy, what makes his morals right. You can do other ways, but that's the easiest way. This is usually done to a deity, or a prophet, or a national leader, or some such thing.”

“Or a document,” I said, catching on. “'We hold these truths to be self-evident'.”

“Yes, like the Declaration of Independence; good point. And you'll notice a lot of people even today say things like 'if the founding fathers saw this today...' as if that was a moral argument. This is a type of moral absolutism; whether a specific figure would consider something right or not is what they use to determine if it's right or not, and the fact that right and wrong exist as discrete entities is never questioned.”

“Okay, but people who follow the same figures disagree on morals all the time,” I said. “So their absolutism can't be that... absolute.”

“Are you sure about that?” My dad raised an eyebrow, his face settling into the expression he used to use when asking me science questions when I was small. _Why do the trees use so much energy growing tall, Cassie? Wouldn't it be better for them if they all stayed short?_ “Many people – actually, I strongly suspect all people – who use moral absolutism do it to justify what they already believe in their hearts to be moral. They just need a... a reason that can be vocalised, so they rely on the words of an unquestionable god or leader or philosopher or legal document. And some of them using the same focus will disagree with each other, but you'll notice, none of them disagree with the _focus_. They disagree with the other person's _interpretation_. They say the focus changed their mind, or was mistranslated, or that this is a special case. But the focus' word is still absolute. So that's one way to deal with the issue. It doesn’t have to be a person, either; an ethical framework works just as well, so long as you believe right is right and wrong is wrong and don’t question that. It’s just easier to do with names and faces and commandments.”

“That doesn't sound very... rational.”

“Sounds like your belief in rationality is pretty absolutist.”

He had me there.

“Anyway,” he continued, “the real problem with using that kind of moral absolutism is that it might work fine for vague ideas like being 'free and equal', but the more specific your rules get, the more infallible your moral lawmaker has to be. Which is probably why so many of them end up either divine or divinely inspired. And the more specific they are, the more faith you need. And I know you don't like faith.” He smiled. “Your _other_ major option is to do the opposite. Accept that you are one small, fallible human, and that your goals are your own, and that your morals are arbitrary. And build the ones that you want, to make the world that you want to see. And then follow them.”

“'Might makes right',” I said.

“No. _You_ make right. You won't always have the most might, but you'll still be able to resist those who do, if you think they're wrong. _Know_ what you believe in, so you know what you're fighting for, and accept that it's _yours_.”

My dad's advice was a whole lot less useful than I'd hoped. “Most people tell their kids to be nice and not do drugs or hurt anybody,” I said.

He laughed and rubbed my head. “Well, if you turn into the next Hitler, then we'll know I should've told you that instead,” he said, getting up to leave. “But as a sensible little environmental warrior who spends her free time literally bandaging wounded animals in the forest, I think we're safe. Just trust your heart, Cassie. You'll do fine.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” I kept it together as he left.

I kept it together as I took the oatmeal packets out again.

I kept it together, effortlessly, as I started once again recording ingredients.

'Just trust your heart', he'd said. 'If you turn into the next Hitler', he'd said. I was fourteen and already I'd erased the entire land mass of a planet, wiping out at the very least thousands of species, hacked whole branches off an evolutionary tree. At my age, Hitler hadn't even applied for art school yet.

And what bothered me most wasn't the elimination of all those animals, wasn't the dying screams and panicked thoughts of hork-bajir and Leerans and various other Controllers in my head as they were eliminated by the heat and pressure and tiny, high-speed fragments of stone. What bothered me most wasn't that I could remember that moment, scored into my brain like some kind of mental callus as a result of seeing it over and over and over.

What bothered me was that I remembered that scene, and deep in my heart... I felt nothing at all.


	6. Chapter 6

My mom gave me a slightly bemused look when I came inside. I assumed my dad has spoken to her. I knew that look – it was her 'my little girl's growing up' look. It was the look she'd used the first time I'd asked about boys, and the first time I'd bandaged a bird's wing by myself, and the time I'd protested 'that's not fair!' when she first explained to me why I needed to be better behaved and more sensible and get better grades than Rachel if I wanted the same amount of respect.

And I couldn't very well take her aside and say 'Okay, mom, maybe every teenager does sit down and wonder about the meaning of good and evil, but for most teenagers, 'be good and don't do drugs' is enough. Most teenagers can't hurt all that many people if they get it wrong. Most teenagers don't have to rip out throats with their teeth and decide if super-powerful aliens should kidnap people for nature preserves and blow up continents and condemn people to permanent slavery in order to damage their slavers.' That wasn't a conversation that I could have. For the first time in my life, my dad's advice had been nearly useless, and I couldn't tell either of them why.

So I ate dinner, and I made small talk, and then I went upstairs and did my homework, because homework wasn't complicated in the same way that the rest of my life was. One plus one would always equal two, and the square root of forty nine would always be the square root of forty nine, even if I needed a calculator to figure that out. And if I got the answer wrong, a whole bunch of people wouldn't die because of it.

I managed to get a lot of homework done. Confusion-based productivity. Maybe I was onto something.

What I wanted to do, what I really wanted to do, was go for a run. Put on some hair and some horse legs and bolt through the fields until my sides heaved. Not even to test some kind of morphing limit or try to control healing or anything like that; I didn't want to _think_. Thinking was confusing. I scanned my room for something to distract myself; my eyes alighted on my corkboard.

 _WE HAVE LOVED THE STARS TOO FONDLY TO BE FEARFUL OF THE NIGHT_ stood out brightly in colored pen, pinned across the top.

“Thanks for that, Sarah Williams,” I sighed. Sarah Williams could afford not to be fearful of the night – presumably, a hork-bajir had never stepped out of it and tried to cut her in half. I threw my pillow at the noticeboard, which promptly crashed down, resulting in both of my parents shouting upstairs to ask if anything was wrong. And me having to lie, again. “Everything's fine!”

 _Everything's fine_. Maybe I should just stick that up on my noticeboard. Maybe if enough people believed that, I could make it real.

I hung the board back up, collected all the thumbtacks I could find in the carpet, and spelled out _EVERYTHING'S FINE_ with them in the middle of the board.

And then I pinned the Sarah Williams quote over the top, because the thumbtack message made me look crazy.

How did the other Animorphs do it? Were Jake and Marco and Rachel sitting in their rooms right now, staring at corkboards? Was Ax going through some obscure andalite ritual to reaffirm his ideals? Did Tobias worry about feeling little animal hearts go still in his claws when he spent his days trying to free the world?

I wanted to go to bed and sleep, but I knew that lying alone in the dark with my thoughts would make things worse. And trying to do any kind of science would make things worse. And distracting myself by going downstairs to talk to my parents would make things worse. And writing my thoughts down would make things worse.

I carefully slid open my window and slipped out, not bothering to try to climb down carefully. I dropped the two stories, landed badly, and felt a bone in my leg crack. I bit my lip to prevent myself from crying out and tasted blood. Neither injury was important; within a matter of minutes, they would be gone.

I focused on Midnight's DNA within me.

I wore the form of a horse, and I ran.


	7. Chapter 7

I was a total zombie in class on Monday. I don't think anybody noticed. Total zombie was probably considered my normal state of being.

Fortunately, the scouting mission plan for the Yeerk Pool was simple. Some Controllers kept very strict schedules, and Tobias had some of them memorised. He knew when a specific woman would enter the McDonald's, and that she would order her meal and go straight down to the Pool.

So we six flies settled on her back.

<How are you doing, Tobias?> I asked privately.

<Me? Fine. I'm fine. Why wouldn't I be fine?> he snapped.

<Well, apart from when you came down to get us when the Pool was empty, this is your first time down since – >

<That doesn't matter. It's fine. I mean, it's a horrifying place, but that's true for everyone.>

I decided not to press the matter. I hadn't bothered to try to talk him out of coming by claiming we needed a scout or something – the rest of the team would have gone along with that, but I knew Tobias wouldn't appreciate it. He'd think he wasn't pulling his weight, which was stupid, because he devoted more to the fight than any of us. But the dread that was growing in my tiny fly stomach at the prospect of going to the Yeerk Pool, that was presumably growing in all our stomachs... it had to be twice as bad for Tobias. Tobias, who'd already been trapped in morph once. Tobias, who'd been trapped in morph in the Yeerk Pool, the very place we were going, on his first visit, who had hidden and waited knowing that if he was found he was dead, knowing that his clock was running down, and who had never spoken of how he got out.

Our transport headed into the McDonald's and up to the counter, the delicious scents of sugar and fat wafting over us. She stood patiently in line for a few minutes and I wondered how long it would take if, say, Marco morphed gorilla and just picked her up and carried her away... I wondered how many hours it would take before the yeerk began to starve. How much free time did they allow themselves?

And once we'd looked around, once we knew our plan, we'd be sitting on somebody much like this to get into the Yeerk Pool again – perhaps on this very woman – and we'd let the yeerk walk us down the steps toward the Pool, and it would get in the Pool, and we would dump poison in after it.

She got to the counter. She asked, as Tobias had said she would, for a Happy Meal 'with extra Happy'. The server gave a small, tight smile, like it was a joke he'd heard thousands of times.

<Why do they even need a code phrase?> Marco wondered. <I mean, it's not like anybody except Controllers are going to know there's any secret passage in here at all. Having the code phrase seems redundant.>

<Maybe something needs to be unlocked and they think calling out 'hey, I need to go down the passage to the alien base, can somebody get the door' might draw attention?> Tobias suggested.

The woman casually stepped out of line and headed down a little employee-only hallway into the kitchen, where a tired-looking kid with a mop let her (and us) into the walk-in freezer. I felt the cold seem into me almost immediately. One problem with being so tiny is that as a fly I had basically no ability to hold onto heat. (Fun fact: if something warm-blooded like a human was the size of a fly, it would freeze to death within a couple of minutes. Fortunately, cold doesn't kill flies easily.)

The freezer door closed behind us and the woman waited patiently for another door to open in the back. She stepped into a second, smaller room. I felt some kind of tingle as we moved through the doorway. Before the door had even closed, an alarm rang.

BrrrrEEEEET! BrrrrEEEEET! "Unauthorized life-form detected." BrrrrEEEEET BrrrrEEEEET! "Unauthorized life-form detected."

The alarm startled me and I took flight. I wasn't the only one; somebody else was hovering next to me. The woman caught sight of us and frowned.

“Security fanatics,” she muttered. “It's just a couple of flies.”

BrrrrEEEEET! BrrrrEEEEET! “Please close your eyes to protect against retinal damage from the Gleet Biofilter.”

<We must leave!> Ax said desperately. A fly zipped past me towards the door.

When your alien ally insists on leaving when a warning alarm goes off, you don't question it. We all followed Ax out mere moments before the door snapped shut, creating a little breeze that sent me tumbling. I righted myself in time to hear some kind of hum from the other side of the door.

<Is everybody alright?> Ax asked. <Prince Jake?>

<Who's here?> Jake asked. <Everyone here?>

One by one, we answered. We were all there.

<Ax,> Jake said, <what was that?>

<A Gleet Biofilter. It is a scanning system used in many parts throughout the galaxy. The system is being phased out in many areas because it has certain inefficiencies, but – >

<What does it do, Ax?>

<It scans lifeforms that are present and reads their bioprint... in the case of Earth life, probably their DNA or some such thing. If the signature is not present, it raises an alert and uses a low-wave disintegration beam, most likely a Dracon beam in this case, to eliminate tresspassers.>

<Is that woman going to die?> I asked.

<No. It is most likely that the Biofilter is programmed to eliminate smaller, less resilient life, and that the Controller will be investigated by security on the other side.>

<Let me guess,> Jake said grimly, <we can expect these things to be on all entrances?>

<Almost definitely, Prince Jake.>

<They're adapting,> Marco said. He didn't sound happy about it.

<Good,> Rachel said. <Let them keep trying to pull this thorn from their side. Let them keep spending time and resources worrying about us. Let's get them running to keep up.>

Inspiring words. They didn't solve our problem.

<Ax, how long have we been in morph?> Jake asked.

<Approximately nineteen of your minutes, Prince Jake.>

<They're everyone's minutes, Ax,> Marco said.

Satisfied that we were alone, I demorphed enough to prop the freezer door open and remorphed. We zoomed out to the freezer, throught the McDonald's, out the front door and up to the roof. Demorph, go bird, go home.

<So,> Marco said as we demorphed, <what now?>

<We need to find a way in,> Rachel said. <We break one of those biofilters or something and charge right down.>

<I'm pretty sure trying that would set off an alarm,> Tobias pointed out. <I don't know about you guys but I'd rather not get into another Yeerk Pool fight. They never seem to go well.> He'd had the least morphing to do, and was already done – I don't think he chose that moment to preen his wing as a way of making a point, but I'm pretty sure we all took the same point away from it.

<We could tr – > “Vi culd try digging,” Marco said, and rubbed his newly-human jaw. “We could be a mole or something and just... dig right down to the Pool.”

“Marco,” I said, “would you want to dig down to the Pool with a shovel?”

He blinked at me like I was crazy. “What? No.”

“Well, in terms of vertical depth, a human with a shovel can work a lot quicker than pretty much any burrowing creature,” I explained. “And even more so since we'd all be able to dig at once, whereas if we were digging a mole tunnel or something we'd have to go one at a time.” I closed my eyes and focused on the osprey within me, felt myself once again begin to shrink.

“Ax,” Jake asked, “can you reprogram it or something?”

<The console system is almost certainly in the Pool complex itself. And even if I could access it, it is... likely that the yeerks would not be using a system that is common to our people. There is no guarantee that I would understand it without training.>

“Cassie, is there anything that can pass through the biofilter, do you think?” Jake asked.

I waited for my thought-speak to kick in before answering. <I don't know. How would I know?>

“Well, you're the animal person.”

<So I'm supposed to know of an animal that can survive some kind of vague sterilisation procedure that might be a Dracon beam? I'm supposed to know some sort of animal that won't register as an unregistered 'bioprint', that might have something to do with DNA – which, by the way, all Earth life has? I'm not a magic book of morphing solutions.>

There was a slight pause. I spent it growing feathers as quickly as I could.

“Uh, Cassie?” Rachel asked. “Are you okay?”

<Of course I'm okay. Why wouldn't I be okay? I just don't have an answer. But I do have a lot of chores. Good show everyone, let me know if anybody gets any good yeerk-poisoning ideas.> I took to the sky, faltered, and then stabilised as my morph finished mid-air.

I flew home, and I didn't look back.


	8. Chapter 8

It was six in the morning, and I had chores to do before school. But instead I was sitting under a tree at the edge of the forest with an open book of neatly dated notes at my feet and a notepad in my lap, with the words GLEET BIOFILTER written across the top of the page.

Because I was the animal person. Because that was my job.

I wrote, _measures 'bioprint' (DNA?)_ underneath it.

Then I wrote, _eliminates organisms with bioprint not programmed in – also possible retinal damage_.

There. That was it. That was everything I knew about the Gleet Biofilter.

What I should do, logically, was go find Ax and press him for more information. But I didn't want to talk to him right then. I didn't want to talk to any of the Animorphs right then.

Maybe my dad was right. Maybe I should get a religion. I knew that there were some rationalist-compatible religions floating around, if one cared to look. And even the religions that did require believing in actual gods and stuff... well, I'd had conversations with a being that could stop time, see everything and be everywhere at once, and that had taken some humans to live on another world and created a valley for the freed hork-bajir on ours. If somebody told me that an ellimist, or a similar being, or something even more powerful, had seeded the Earth with life and given commandments to its children... it wasn't technically the _most_ rational explanation, but it was a pretty reasonable one.

And... and come to think about it, what about souls? I knew that there was some part of me, some part separate from my brain, that had my thoughts and memories and personality and controlled my body when I was in morph. A fly brain physically couldn't hold a human mind in it, but I'd never had a problem thinking as a fly. I'd always kind of assumed that it was something created by the morphing technology, that my brain was... I don't know, kept space in zero-space or something when I morphed, but I'd never actually asked Ax about it, and if technology could do that, why couldn't nature? Each explanation was as good as the other with the information I had available.

But neither of those things actually solved my problem. It would be cool to know the origin of life, and it would be cool to know if souls were real, but they weren't actually all that relevant. If some being came to me and said, 'I am your creator, now kill seventy babies', I certainly wouldn't believe that killing babies was a good thing just because they said so. If they said 'save seventy babies', then I'd consider that a good thing – but that's because I already believed that killing babies was bad and saving them was good, not because of whatever that being said. And as for souls, sure, I could say 'souls are sacred and things with them are worthy of life and protection' – but how was that different than saying such a thing about intelligence or sentience? What if humans had souls and chee didn't – would that make it okay to kill the chee? Or if the pemalites had imbued the chee with souls, what if some similar race did the same thing to my calculator? Would that make hurting my calculator bad? I didn't know all that much about the chee, but a calculator was probably to a chee what a termite was to a human, I thought. Where was the line? And why was I so confused? I'd never had a problem before. I'd always been... well, not necessarily sure what right and wrong was, but I'd always felt like it was something I could reason through. I'd always had a sense of it that I thought I could trust. But I wasn't sure if I could trust myself any more.

They say that about ninety per cent of physical pain isn't actually pain – it's anxiety, knowing the possible consequences of pain, fearing the pain. This is why placebos can be really effective painkillers, and why anti-anxiety drugs can be given to people who are allergic to painkillers. It was probably also why injuries that would've seemed completely incapacitating to me a year ago were now just footnotes in my life – I was so used to being able to heal anything that I wasn't scared of pain any more. Maybe there was a similar thing about mental pain. Maybe I'd just walked the line of right and wrong so many times that I just didn't notice it any more. Maybe the automatic, subconscious little part of me that told me when I approached that line had been ignored so much that I just didn't notice it any more.

Or maybe all the various forms of alien telepathy that had dumped information in my brain had done actual mental damage. Maybe human brains weren't built to absorb andalite distress signals and computer coding instructions, or the mental anguish of dozens of people that my Leeran brain had processed so easily.

Or maybe I was missing something. Maybe there was some kind of flaw in my reasoning; maybe there was an answer and I'd forgotten to metaphorically carry the one somewhere.

Or maybe I really was just growing up.

On impulse, I jumped to my feet and kicked the tree behind me, hard. Something snapped in my foot. Pain bloomed. Great, I'd need to morph that. And I didn't have much time before I needed to get ready for school.

My eyes caught the notepad lying on the ground, face-up. The title _GLEET BIOFILTER_.

Right.

The obvious way to get through would be to morph a Controller. But we'd have to touch Controllers to morph them, which meant that if we were found out, then the Controllers would know they had been acquired, or at least Visser Three would, and if they hadn't been around any andalites recently... well, anything that hinted at us being human was a bad plan.

Besides, there were six of us. Six Controllers. Six ways for things to go wrong.

Other options? Well. Something not scanned by the biofilter, something that it wouldn't be programmed to recognise as life. All Earth life was basically the same, but it was very likely that aliens were different enough not to 'count', to have to be programmed in separately. That was conjecture based on not nearly enough information, of course – but it was all I had. Hork-bajir and andalites were probably included, because the whole point of the biofilters was to stop andalites. But what about Leerans? The Yeerk Empire had no idea that our little Earth group of 'andalite bandits' had fought on Leera.

Of course, they would probably figure it out if a bunch of Leerans walked into the Pool complex. But if we morphed, demorphed in the tunnels, took on a new form... and Leerans, unlike flies, could actually carry oatmeal. Take it through the biofilter, have Marco take it through the tunnel as a gorilla, protect him while he dumped it in the Pool, and...

And what, exactly? How would we get out? That was going to be a problem with any plan, but it was kind of an important one. If we drew attention to ourselves down there, well, they were ready for us now. And we wouldn't have time to morph back to Leeran and get _out_ past the biofilters, even if they didn't just seal all the doors and shut us in, which would be the logical thing to do.

Okay. What else did I know about the biofilters? At least, what else could I predict about the biofilters?

Well. They probably didn't scan bacteria. Morphing bacteria sounded like the worst idea ever, but I wrote that down anyway. Humans were covered in bacteria, and their intestines were full of bacteria, and they needed those things to stay healthy. There were billions and billions of species, and they mutated all the time – no way was anybody plugging all of that stuff into a computer somewhere, meaning that the biofilter couldn't detect them or the alarm would go off all the time.

And the Dracon beam or whatever it was... it probably didn't _kill_ bacteria. Human needed them; if a human was sterilised whenever that alarm went off, it would die. So the beam probably didn't go any deeper than the skin. Could it be made stronger if we went down as wolves and tigers and gorillas? Maybe. Or maybe the yeerks would just greet anybody who set off the alarm with a huge army at the bottom of the stairs. Either option wasn't great. But... but going big probably wasn't the only way to protect ourselves from the biofilter. No; there was another way. Maybe we could do small. Maybe we just had to do the right _kind_ of small.

I smiled to myself and looked down at my notes. I was pretty sure I had the beginnings of a plan.

And Marco was going to absolutely hate it.


	9. Chapter 9

The four of us – Jake, Marco, Rachel and I – ate lunch together in a semi-isolated corner of the cafeteria, far enough away from everyone else that we wouldn't be overheard but not far away enough to be weird. Across from me, Rachel was pretending not to shoot me concerned looks when I wasn't looking. Marco was pretending not to shoot her concerned looks. Next to me, Jake lifted a forkful of macaroni and cheese to his nose and sniffed it suspiciously. He was being very careful not to shoot anybody any kind of concerned look.

“Tapeworms,” I said.

“No,” Marco said. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay, well, what about something like hookworms? They're much harder to get a hold of but we might be able to find something like them if we're creative.”

“What,” Marco asked, “are hookworms?”

“Oh, they're really neat! They bury under human skin and then move about just above the fat layer and – ”

“No. Noooope. No way.”

I spread my hands. “Well, if Marco is going to be fussy, I'm all out of ideas.”

“Fussy? I thought 'I'm not turning into a tapeworm and hanging around in some alien slave's guts' was a pretty reasonable limit.”

“That sort of thing would be too risky anyway,” Jake pointed out. “Getting into a Controller, through the biofilter, and out within two hours?” He shook his head. “So many things could go wrong.”

I had a sudden, horrifying vision of being forced to demorph from under somebody's skin. Apparently I wasn't the only one, because everybody at the table shuddered.

Rachel stirred her macaroni and cheese slowly, thoughtfully. “What if I told you guys,” she said slowly, “that I had a crazy idea?”

“That would not surprise me in the least,” Marco said.

“What if I told you guys that I had a crazy idea that didn't involve any violence?”

“That surprises me quite a bit more.”

“What are you thinking, Rachel?” Jake asked.

“Well,” she said under her breath after glancing about to make absolutely certain she couldn't be overheard, “ideally, we want to get this stuff into as many Controllers as possible, right? I mean, dumping it in the Pool might work. Putting it in humans, preferably at some kind of Controller hotspot, is better. Preferably one we don't have to break into or anything. And one where people will just eat any random thing and we don't have to force them.”

“Yeah,” Marco said. “So?”

Rachel gestured around the cafeteria with one hand. Jake stared at his macaroni as if he'd never seen the stuff before. Marco actually put his hand in his hands.

“How did it take so long for that to occur to us?” he muttered. “It's such an _obvious thing_.”

“It's exactly what we feared _they_ were going to try on _u_ s,” I mumbled, dumbfounded. “And yet we didn't even think of doing it to _them_.”

“And the stuff we need is _right on campus_ ,” Jake added, shaking his head. “How did we miss that?”

“And we can distract them from noticing anything with the Pool thing,” Rachel added, somehow managing to sound very self-satisfied without raising her voice.

“Except we still don't have a way in,” Marco protested.

“Oh, there's a way in,” Rachel said. “This is the crazy part.”

“The crazy part without violence that you mentioned?”

“There... might... be a tiny amount of violence.”


	10. Chapter 10

We refined the plan, found Ax and Tobias after school, and refined it further. What we ended up with was a two-pronged plan – the first, to secretly introduce oatmeal into the school lunches. With luck, we could addict a lot of yeerks at once. The second, to dump oatmeal right into the Pool, like the original plan – and whether or not that worked, it should hide the other plan nicely, as well as force them to drain the Pool and, knowing Visser Three, probably kill off a lot of yeerks just to save himself later trouble.

But first, we needed to prepare. Which is why, that night, we met at Marco's.

“Right,” Marco said as he opened the door to let me in, “my dad's at work until like 3 in the morning, so let the late-night oatmeal party begin! You good with your parents?”

“I told them I was having dinner at Rachel's,” I said as I walked in.

“What a coincidence, Rachel's having dinner at your place. Let's hope your parents don't call each other.”

“What are we actually having for dinner?”

“Stew. By which I mean I boiled a bunch of stuff until it went gooey.”

“Wow, gourmet chef. Who else is here?”

“So far, Rachel and Jake. Ax and Tobias might take a while. They did have to break into a supermarket and all.” Marco led me into the kitchen as he said that. Rachel and Jake, who were sitting at the table eating chips, both looked up.

“I know it's stealing,” Jake said, “but – ”

“But I'm sure the supermarket can spare some cheap oatmeal for the sake of humanity,” I said before anybody could start the tiptoe-around-Cassie's-morality rationalising. Although it did kind of annoy me that he was worried I'd care about that sort of thing. Even before I'd blown up any major land masses, I liked to think my morals were more along the lines of 'killing people for no reason is screwed up!' than 'but in kindergarten they said stealing was baaad!' He looked relieved at my statement, which annoyed me even more. I shoved some chips in my mouth before I could say anything snippy.

“So when our last couple of guests arrive, the late-night oatmeal party can begin,” Marco said dramatically.

“It's not a late-night oatmeal party,” I said. “We're stocking mission supplies.”

“Of course it's a party. There's chips. You and Jake. Me and Rachel.” He sat down next to Rachel.

“If you touch me, I will break your arm,” Rachel said firmly. “I'm warning you as a friend, Marco. You're one of the few people whose arm I can break without any consequence, so don't think I won't do it.”

“Aww, I care about you too, Rachel,” Marco said, inching his chair away ever so slightly.

The doorbell rang. Then it immediately rang again. Then a third time. Marco sighed, shook his head, and got up to answer it.

“Does this situation strike you guys as a little bit silly?” I asked the others.

“You mean the part about using oatmeal as a weapon, the part with yeerks going insane, or the part where we're a bunch of scantily-clad teenagers having a secret party at a friend's house for access to his microwave?”

“Yes,” I said.

Marco entered carrying a large box full of little boxes of oatmeal. “I'm just saying, Ax, you only need to ring the bell once.”

“What if the first ring is not heard?” Ax asked, following him with a second box. “Ring-ing-ing.”

“Well then you can ring a second time.”

“But how am I, on the outside of the door, able to discern where a ring has been heard, without some kind of returning sound system?”

“How did you guys carry all that stuff here?” I asked Tobias, who was entering with a third box. “There's no way you could've flown with it.”

“You don't want to know,” Tobias said.

“Were you seen?” Jake asked.

“Seen? Maybe. There are security cameras and I can't be sure we avoided all of them. Identifiable? No.” Tobias dumped the box on the table. “Will this be enough?”

“It'd better be,” Marco said. “I don't think we have milk for more.” We'd all brought what spare milk we could take from our homes without suspicion, but Marco would be providing the bulk of it. He had a whole cupboard of that boxed long-life stuff – 'for emergencies', he'd said, although there really couldn't be too many emergencies that needed a small dairy farm's worth of milk.

We set up a sort of production line; Tobias mixing ingredients, Marco manning the microwave, and Rachel and myself setting up for the final phase, which was to take the prepared oeatmeal and strain all the actual oatmeal out of it with a pair of stockings. Jake poured the resulting liquid into the empty milk cartons that were beginning to pile up while Ax disposed of the oatmeal. He was meant to throw it in the trash bin outside, but rather a lot of it went into his mouth instead.

“We're sure this liquid will work?” Jake asked.

“Pretty sure,” I said. “I mean, ninety nine per cent sure. It's obviously some kind of combination of chemicals involved, since it's this oatmeal and _only_ this oatmeal that works, but I'm pretty sure that the oatmeal itself can't be involved. When oatmeal is digested, it doesn't really... well, anything important _should be_ in the liquid.”

It took about four hours to prepare and strain all the oatmeal, not including the half-hour break for stew. The kitchen was an absolute mess, and we ended up with twenty milk cartons full strained oatmeal. Twenty litres of yeerk poison.

“Is it going to be enough?” I asked.

“It'd better be,” Marco groaned. “I never want to see oatmeal again in my life.”

“Oat-meeeeeeal.”

“I know, Ax. I know.”

“Any more and you might not be able to carry it,” Tobias pointed out.

“True. Very true.”

“Right,” Jake said. “Let's all go home and get some rest and get ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow and Wednesday, they're what counts.” He glanced at me. “Cassie, you can get us the... the thing?”

He didn't even want to say the name. I didn't blame him.

“Yeah,” I said. “It shouldn't be too hard to find.” I didn't say it with any enthusiasm. I wasn't looking forward to this mission.

Nobody was.


	11. Chapter 11

I really should have gone to bed and rested up. But I didn't. I'd just spent over four hours making oatmeal with my friends and I was... more confused than ever.

I still wasn't sure about this whole mission. I mean, on the one hand, there was a behaviour-altering infection taking hold in our town, and when nobody else could do anything about it, we had a moral responsibility to treat them, to contain the infection. And it's not like we were going for a brick-people-in-their-houses-and-burn-them Black Death method or anything. We were just feeding them oatmeal. It wouldn't kill them.

It _might_ leave them in permanent, part-time slavery.

The whole plan kind of rested on the assumption that the addiction would spread and cause social problems for the yeerks, but would be dealt with before the yeerks we addicted became immune to Kandrona. That way, the hosts could just be locked up until the drug left their system and then be given a new yeerk. At least, we hoped so. We had no reason to know whether they'd be found that quickly or not, and if they didn't... well... then the word about the yeerks would get out, wouldn't it? And we didn't need to be involved. And we could keep our old lives, if we wanted to. And... and in the end, even if that happened, even if some students were trapped with insane yeerks in their heads permanently, well, the end result would still save a lot of lives that we would otherwise have to kill, right? All I had to do was poison the people I knew, saw every day, had classes with.

I wondered if Rachel would have even suggested the plan if she didn't know that most of her friends at our school were probably yeerk-free Star Defenders.

I wondered if Jake would've gone along with it if Tom still went to our school.

I wondered if I would've gone along with it if I'd had any real friends outside the Animorphs.

I mean, sure, I knew other people. I used to hang out with other people, when I'd had the time, although not very often. But I wouldn't really have considered anybody except Rachel a very good friend, even back then, and since being an Animorph, since fighting alongside my five brothers and sisters in arms, bleeding on them, holding their wounds closed and talking them out of morphs, collapsing in an exhausted haze with them on some random rooftop... well, most other relationships kind of paled into insignificance anyway. But I couldn't afford not to care about other people. I couldn't afford to think of my classmates as tools.

So instead of going to be being alone with my thoughts doing nothing, I bid my parents goodnight, morphed owl and went to be alone with my thoughts in the forest. After all, I still had a job to do before Wednesday. I needed to get the materials for my plan to beat the Gleet Biofilter.

I didn't _want_ to be alone, but I couldn't bring myself to talk to the other Animorphs. They'd reassure me, pull up the usual justifications. Marco would roll his eyes and call me a tree-hugging moraliser and then give some sensible-sounding advice about practicality and war. Rachel would give me a pep talk about having guts and doing what needs to be done. Tobias would probably concede that we needed to respect life but make a horribly misinformed 'survival of the fittest' argument of some kind. Jake would prioritise keeping us all calm and on-task rather than my confused moral concerns, and Ax almost certainly wouldn't even understand the problem, especially since I didn't seem to be able to vocalise it even to myself. My parents? Tried it; they didn't have enough information on my life to be useful. Dr Johnson? Couldn't; he was a Controller, it was far too dangerous to even allude to anything. Melissa might have problems similar enough to sympathise, I wasn't sure; but she didn't know we were human, and we wanted to keep it that way. The chee... didn't do violence, and I wasn't sure they really understood it. Not even Erek.

But there was someone! Someone who had lived through the war, who had committed violence against their will; who knew who I was and who posed no security risk. I banked left and headed deeper into the forest, headed for the mountains.

Headed towards the valley where we'd left the free hork-bajir.


	12. Chapter 12

The hork-bajir valley is really difficult to spot, even from the air. You have to be flying directly over it to really notice it, and even then, from the sky it looks like any other mountain valley. I landed in three of the wrong valleys before finally alighting in the correct one.

It wasn't until I demorphed that I realised that hork-bajir were almost definitely not nocturnal. Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak would be asleep. I sighed and felt around for a rock to sit on and regain my strength before morphing again, shivering in my thin morphing suit. We _had_ to figure out how to do thicker clothing.

“Why does our friend visit?” a voice said right next to my ear.

“Yaah!” I leapt backwards, tripped on something on the ground, and fell. A strong pair of leathery arms caught me.

“Be careful. Dark.”

“Ket Halpak?”

“Yes.”

“It's, uh, it's Cassie.”

“Ket knows. Smell and hear you. Trouble?”

“No. Not trouble. I just, uh, wanted to talk.”

“I show cave.” Ket picked me up and headed off at great speed. She seemed to be better at navigating in the dark than I was, so I just held on.

“What are you doing up?” I asked her.

“I watch. Keep safe. Later, Jara watch.”

“For yeerks?”

“For danger.”

“You think the valley is dangerous?”

“No. But _atenoj_ not think homeworld dangerous.”

“Good point.”

We were climbing a cliff face by then, Ket easily pulling both of us up. She made a low kind of bird sound deep in her throat. There was a higher-pitched reply from somewhere very close, and then something began to glow right above us. Greenish light from within a cave, too steady to be a flame. Ket pulled us in.

“Friend Cassie comes,” she said unnecessarily, setting me gently on the cave floor.

“Hi, Jara,” I said.

“Trouble?” he asked. He held some kind of glowing stone in one claw, which dimly lit the cave.

“No. No trouble.”

“Ah. Then see _kawatnoj_.”

“ _Kawat_ – your baby? You had the baby?” I'd forgotten about the baby.

Jara moved. Behind him, in a little depression in the wall, was something leathery and about half the size of a human, all curled up. As I watched, it – she – unfolded into a little female hork-bajir, and climbed up onto her father's shoulders, using his blades as handholds.

“Toby, this friend Cassie. Cassie, this Toby Halmee. Free hork-bajir.”

“Hi, Toby,” I whispered.

Toby stared at me, blinking softly. She made some kind of trilling sound deep in her throat. Jara reached up and rubbed her forehead blades.

“Hi, Cassie,” Toby said.

I blinked at her. “How old...?”

“Moon has gone big three times since Toby open eyes,” Ket said.

“And you called her Toby.”

“We say, 'what name for first free hork-bajir?' We say, 'guide who find our freedom, we put his story in her',” Jara explained. He frowned at me. At least, I think it was a frown. Hork-bajir faces are difficult to read. “Cassie eyes wet. Cassie hurt them?”

“No.” I rubbed my eyes on my glove. “I'm fine. It's a human thing.”

Jara nodded. “Humans in cages, they have eyes wet. Not all, but many. Jara think hurt; outside hurt or inside hurt.”

“It can be,” I admitted. “But people tear up... uh, humans get wet eyes... for all kinds of reasons.”

He nodded again. “But you fight, and perhaps they will have less wet eyes, if you are lucky.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “If we're lucky.”

“You come to hork-bajir now,” Ket said. “You need help?”

“No. No, I... I just wanted to see how you were doing. I should go, though. I'm glad you're doing well. It was nice to meet you, Toby.”

I turned to leave, but Ket put a hand on my elbow. “Cassie,” she said gently. “ _Fellana_. We help.”

I nodded, swallowing. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. What was I thinking, tracking down the two beings who had actually escaped, actually gotten a happy ending, to burden them with my war problems? To drag them into this stuff? No. No, I couldn't involve them in this.

“I need to find a tick,” I said. “Do you know where would be good to look?”

“Not know word,” Ket said.

“Ah, a small animal.” I held up a couple of fingers to indicate. “This big, and white. They latch onto animals and suck their blood until they swell up to about this big.”

“Ah.” Jara nodded. “We have seen. Tomorrow we find.”

“Easy to find,” Ket agreed.

Ticks turned up a lot when we didn't want them to, but I wouldn't really call them easy to find. Nevertheless, if Ket and Jara were confident that they could find one, I believed them. “I need it alive,” I said.

“We find,” Jara assured me. “Alive.”

“Thank you.”

“You stay tonight?” Ket asked.

“I can't. I... my parents will be worried if I'm not home. It was nice to meet you, Toby.”

The little hork-bajir watched carefully and curiously as I closed my eyes and focused on the owl in me. Three months old. Three months old and already moving about and learning things and _talking_. Ax had always given the opinion that hork-bajir were sort of dim. But then, I supposed, development speed said very little about intelligence. Maybe hork-bajir lifespans were just short.

But still, three months.

Well, I'd solved one of my problems. If Ket and Jara came through, then we'd be in a position to test our theory on beating the Gleet Biofilter. And then we'd be able to strike a blow that, in the view of Jara Hamee, might stop some human eyes from getting wet.

You know, except for the ones we were poisoning.


	13. Chapter 13

I paid a lot of attention to the school buildings the next day.

I mean, I knew the layout of the school. I went there every weekday. But certain details were becoming a lot more immediately important. Like the big new lock on the door to the janitor's closet that had, last we'd checked, contained oatmeal. Was it still there, or did they move it after we fell through the ceiling? Didn't matter, really.

The thickness of the walls. The length of certain corridors. The trees between the building where I had history class and the building with the cafeteria. The height of the fence around the school, and the gates in it. All vitally important information.

I watched the people, too. Wondered if any would be on-campus at night doing yeerk business and get caught in the crossfire. Wondered how many would fall to our ploy. It's kind of screwed up when the best case scenario for your plan is for a large proportion of your classmates to start randomly twitching and ranting about aliens.

After school, Tobias and I met across the road from the back of the school. We were doing the job that I was mentally calling 'Star Defender duty' – what we should've asked Melissa to do, but nobody was game enough to raise the idea to Rachel. The other four were the 'main attack force', going for what we hoped the yeerks would think was our plan, while Tobias and I slipped through the back unseen. “All clear?” whispered, checking that the milk cartons we'd prepared last night sat snugly in the saddlebags and that the syringes I'd swiped from the Rehabilitation Centre last night were properly packed.

<We're clear,> Tobias said.

I nodded. “We should morph then. Saddlebags can be tricky the first time.” I closed my eyes and focused on horse. As I grew and dark fur overtook my body, Tobias grew too, his feathers disappearing. He was mostly hork-bajir by the time I'd finished my morph. I waited for him to finish.

<Okay,> I said. <You got the bags?>

“Yeah.” He lifted the saddlebags, hissing under their unexpected weight, and threw them over my back. “Ugh! These things are heavy!”

<Yeah, they're full of stuff. Don't let them fall.>

“This is a lot more unwieldy than I imagined,” he whispered.

<That's what the straps are for.> I carefully talked him through doing up the straps, which turned out to be quite frustrating – I couldn't see them or help, and he'd never put any kind of tack on before and wasn't really accustomed to hork-bajir hands. But eventually, we got them on.

Turns out saddlebags are kind of uncomfortable. I could see why it took a while to teach horses to wear them.

<So,> I said to Tobias, <how have you been?>

“Me? Fine. Why?”

I didn't see how somebody living as a hawk while fighting an alien war could be 'fine', but I didn't press the matter. 'What are you going to do if by some miracle this goes perfectly and we don't need to fight any more?' seemed sort of tactless. Instead, I asked, <Have you spoken to the free hork-bajir recently? Jara and Ket?>

“Oh, yeah. Have you seen little Toby? Isn't she the cutest?”

<Yes, we met. What do you think is going to happen to them? When all this comes out, I mean? When we expose the invasion, or when the andalites get here, or whatever, and if... when... the Earth is saved, what happened to the free hork-bajir?>

“I don't know,” Tobias whispered. “I've been wondering about that. Because, I mean, it's not like they're safe here. People will chase them out of that valley, might try to stick them in a zoo or something, or at the very least make them leave the planet, but they've got nowhere to _go_. Their planet is under yeerk control. I guess... I guess we just have to keep them secret, to protect them.”

<Yeah. I guess.> That sounded lonely. But I knew nothing about hork-bajir social structure. Maybe they liked being alone? I would have to ask.

“I keep thinking, no matter what happens in this war, we saved the Leerans. There might be Leerans lost far from home, enslaved by the yeerks, but while they're alive they not only have hope of being free... they have a planet to go home to, to be free on. And so long as we can stop the yeerks from taking over on Earth, all the human-Controllers, the ones in school and the ones on the Pool Ship and the ones on other planets if they've spread that far, they have that too. So long as some part of Earth is still ours.”

<... Yeah. That's true.> Maybe I should have spoken to Tobias about my problems after all.

<Everyone in position?> Jake asked, his mental voice faint.

<Ready,> I said.

<We're attacking now. Give us a few minutes and then go.>

Somewhere over the other side of the school, a tiger roared.

We counted back from one hundred and twenty. Tobias carefully approached the gate in the back fence of the school that I was pretty sure I'd never seen opened, and glanced around. <We're clear.> He levered the chain around his wrist-blade to break it and pulled the gate open, moving aside so that I could trot through.

Tobias took the lead, scouting each area to be absolutely sure it was clear before calling me forward. If anybody saw him, they'd probably just assume he was a Controller, but it's somewhat more difficult to justify a horse walking around. We'd come in behind the oval and we made our way around it, keeping to the trees, heading for the cafeteria. Or more specifically, the kitchen behind the cafeteria.

The doors were unlocked. Tobias had made sure of that first thing, but I still felt relieved when he pushed them open, letting us easily into the kitchen. While he locked the door from the inside, I demorphed.

“I carry, you do the needle?” he asked as I crawled out from under the saddlebags.

“Sounds good,” I whispered.

Tobias opened the large walk-in fridge while I took out some boxes of oatmeal extract and prepared a syringe. He brought me armfuls of milk cartons and I filled the needle with our extract, pierced the top of each carton in the most unobtrusive place I could find, and slowly forced in a measure of yeerk poison. I was struck suddenly with the image of myself giving a squirrel a pain shot. What we were doing here? That was the opposite of that.

“Will it be enough to matter?” Tobias asked.

“I hope so. We can't just replace all the milk or they'll notice something is off when they open it. It's gotta be a little bit.” But we didn't know how much oatmeal was needed to affect yeerks. We didn't even know _what_ poisoned them.

But the great thing about this plan was, if they didn't figure out what we'd done, we could do it again. And again and again, until we figured out how to make it work. We could let the effects accumulate. And even if they did figure out that a lot of school students were getting addicted to oatmeal, but caught it before the yeerks started to go insane... well, maybe they'd stop recruiting from the school so heavily. Maybe they'd rather not risk it.

We made as little mess as possible while we worked. Ideally, nobody should know we were ever there. I could hear faint sounds from the next building over, where the others were fighting to gain access to the little janitor's closet full of oatmeal. Not much sound travelled that far, but the roar of big wild animals was pretty distinctive and to us, pretty familiar. I picked out the sound of Jake, injured; more anger than pain, probably not dangerous. Rachel, declaring herself but not furious, so not in too much pain or danger. Marco – Marco didn't tend to bellow much in combat, he must be trying to get the attention of Controllers. We worked as quickly as we could. The others could only draw out the attack for so long.

Eventually, we ran out of oatmeal extract. Tobias tossed everything back into the saddlebags while I morphed hork-bajir as quickly as I could. After we made absolutely sure we'd left everything how we found it, I threw the now-much-lighter saddlebags over one shoulder and we dashed out of the door.

<We're done here,> I reported. <Leaving now.>

<Good,> Jake said, <bring in the hawk and let's get 'driven back'. I think they're about to bring in reinforcements anyway.>

Tobias demorphed. I made for the back of the school. While I stashed the saddlebags in an alley to clean up and return to the farm later, I could hear the others relay the occasional instruction to each other and get driven slowly back out of the school.

“Attack,” I muttered to myself. “Go for the storage cupboard the yeerks know we identified on a previous mission when we fell through the roof. Break it, get driven off. Yeerks: one, andalite bandits: zero. They'll buy it. I'm sure they'll buy it.” Would they buy it? Would they wonder why we'd been driven off so easily and suspect a distraction? It didn't matter. They had no way of knowing what we'd distracted them for.

And they only had twenty four hours to think on it, because the next day, we were going to give them something rather more dramatic to worry about.


	14. Chapter 14

“That went way too well,” Marco said. “Our plans never go well. The next part will fail, trust me.” He kicked down a small sapling that had dared grow in his path.

<Can't you ever be happy with a win?> Tobias asked. He sounded irritable. I could see why; the dense jungle trees were no place for a hawk.

“It's not a win yet,” Marco said grimly, turning into little monkey. He climbed up into the trees to join Ax.

“Hang on,” I said, “this isn't right. Something's wrong here.”

“Nothing's ever right for you, is it, Cassie?” Jake snapped. “We're fighting to defend our planet, but no; everything we do is always _wrong_.”

I blinked. That didn't sound like Jake. “I don't – ”

“You don't what, Cassie? All of us are breaking down here. That's what war does. But you're the only one self-centred enough to make your struggles into some kind of universal moral quandary, the only one arrogant enough to stare your problems in the face and then pretend your problems are something entirely different because the truth is just too hard.” He turned to face me, lip curled into a mask of disgust. “I was right the first time. You're weak.”

I should be hurt by the words, I knew. I was mostly confused. This wasn't Jake, this wasn't home, this wasn't...

“Temrash,” I whispered.

And the yeerk had my hair in Jake’s hand and was smashing my head against a tree.

There was blood and motion and...

“You're dead!” I screamed, throwing him off, shoving him away. He fell backwards, onto the jungle floor. Tobias fluttered down to a low branch, puffing his feathers out at Temrash threateningly. Ax and Marco scolded him from above in chittering monkey voices.

“You're _dead_ ,” I spat. “We _killed_ you. We _saved_ him.”

“Yeah,” Temrash snarled. “And now you're gonna save the rest of the world.”

 _Wait a minute_ , I thought. _Where's Rachel? Everyone’s here but Rachel._

I heard a cry, somewhere off in the trees. Jake! The Jake – the Temrash – in front of me laughed harshly. I dashed off into the jungle after the cry.

Rachel lay on the ground, unconscious, in grizzy morph. Blood leaked out of her nose and ears, pooling on the ground, seeming... alive. Her fur, too, seemed alive. No; not fur – ants! She was covered in ants! And they were tearing, biting at her flesh, pulling chunks from her hide. Eating her alive.

“Rachel!” Jake said urgently. “Demorph!” He was trying to drag her bulk to a nearby river, but all the determination in the world wouldn't let a teenage boy shift a grizzly bear. I ran over to help, heedless of the ants that ran up my arms at bit easily through my gloves and into my skin.

There were tears in Jake's eyes. “Rachel, come on! Demorph, you have to demorph!” There were ants in her _eyes_. Her fur was matted with the blood running from her nose.

Jake's face suddenly hardened. He sat back. “Tobias!” he called.

<Here, Jake. She... oh, god!>

“I know. I need another ant nest.”

<More ants?! Jake, they're eating – >

“I know! More ants, hurry!”

Tobias didn't argue. He just took off. Jake punched Rachel, kicked her, anything to try to rouse her. “Rachel!” he screamed.

“Jake,” I said, “she – ”

“She's not dying out here. Not without us knowing what's going on. Not to _ants_.”

<Second ant nest, about thirty feet over this way,> Tobias called. Jake grabbed at Rachel's fur and, with great effort, ripped away a large chunk of grizzly flesh.

“Jake!” I said. “What the hell are you – ”

“No time! I need your help, come on!”

I didn't ask questions. I tore a piece of flesh from her, brushed the ants off, and followed him into the trees.

Under Tobias' direction, we found the nest. Jake ripped a very tiny tuft of bloody fur from his chunk and dropped it onto the nest. It was immediately swarmed with ants. He pulled off another piece and dragged it along the ground, leaving a nearly-invisible trail of blood and ants followed, crawling after the bear chunk; every so often, he would drop a little piece. I watched the ants attack the meat, tear it apart, and was struck with a sudden memory of being an ant myself, cutting up a beetle, being cut up by enemy ants. I'd told Jake all of that, impressed on him the difficulty of the morph, tried to make him understand that we should never be ants.

He remembered, it seemed.

I backed off a little, started my own trail closer to Rachel. By the time his trail met mine, I'd almost stretched mine back to Rachel. As we watched, the second group of ants swarmed down the trail, to Rachel, over Rachel. They encountered the first. Immediately, the two groups set about each other in a frenzy of violence, a seething mass of tiny black bodies.

“Rachel!” Jake shouted again. “Rachel, you have to wake up!”

“Rachel!” I screamed. “Demorph, you have to demorph!”

<Rachel!> Tobias shouted.

<Wha... I...>

<Rachel, demorph! Demorph now!>

Rachel's eyes opened – at least, her eyelids did. There were no eyes inside, just ants. She roared, a bloody, wounded sound; in our heads she screamed. But she was shrinking, healing; the ants that weren't engaged in the battle bit at her soft human flesh undeterred.

<What's happening?!>

“The river!” I cried. “To your left! Get in the river!”

The wailing, flailing mass of shifting girl and grizzly flesh crawled for the river; Jake and I grabbed her, lifted her, flung her in. She sank, screaming, struggling. She fell backwards into the water, and in my mind I heard Ax's voice.

< _I cannot survive much longer. If you can hear me, come_. >

Symbols flashed across the screen in front of me, the holograms difficult to make out with my Leeran eyes, but my tentacles moved through them, unfaltering, following the pattern that Ax had implanted in my mind. The world exploded. The pain, the fear, the desperation of the slaves around me rang through my mind as the land around us vanished. I could hear their screaming.

I was screaming.

I sat up in bed. My throat hurt. My throat hurt? Right. I was still screaming.

“Cassie!” My mother's arms, suddenly around me. “Cassie, it's okay. It's a nightmare. It's just a nightmare. It can't hurt you.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, trembling in my mother's embrace. “I know. It can't hurt me.”


	15. Chapter 15

I think we were hoping school would get cancelled the next day. It didn't, although several classrooms had tarps over them and the students were sent elsewhere. Nobody had bothered explaining the tarps, presumably because it's hard to come up with a cover story for 'a bear trashed several classrooms and the band room while creating a path of retreat from a janitor's closet'.

So we had to go to school. Which put us on a time limit for the final phase of our plan. Especially since we didn’t dare discuss anything at school right after attacking it, so we could put the plan properly underway until we met in the neat little kitchen of an unfamiliar house.

“I hate working on strict time limits,” Jake muttered. “We have no time to practise this morph.”

“To be honest, I really don't think it's going to be a difficult one to control,” I said. Like Jake – like everyone – I was staring at the tiny glass jar sitting on the kitchen table atop a red-and-white chequered tablecloth. In the bottom of the jar sat a single, solitary tick.

“I'll go first then,” Rachel muttered, grabbing the jar. “If you're all going to be such babies about it.”

“I don't like splitting up the group like this,” Marco said. “What about when something goes wrong?”

“You could at least say 'if',” I muttered.

“Ah, Cassie. Ever the optimist.”

“Somebody needs to keep an eye on the woman,” Jake pointed out, taking the tick from Rachel. “Tobias, when does she get home?”

Tobias glanced at the clock. <In about ten minutes. You then have thirty minutes before she walks to McDonald's.>

“We can practise the morph for ten minutes,” I shrugged. “If you're worried.”

“No offense, Cassie, but I don't want to be a tick for one second longer than I absolutely have to,” Rachel said.

I nodded. I didn't blame her. This was gross. This would be our grossest mission yet. I couldn't imagine ever doing anything grosser than this.

Ax was studying the tick with interest. <What a fascinating creature. What does it do?>

I almost told him he didn't want to know. But it would probably be a lot easier to handle the morph if he did. “They latch onto big animals with those teeny claws,” I said, “and then bite into them with their jaws, inject blood thinner, and drink their blood until they swell up into a tiny blood balloon.”

“Did you really need to use the phrase 'tiny blood balloon'?” Rachel groaned.

“I could make a 'bloodthirsty' joke right here...” Marco mused.

“You're on old-lady-guarding duty, you don't get to pick on us,” Rachel snapped.

Jake and I exchanged a glance. He'd designated the positions for the mission, and we'd all pretended the decisions were essentially random, even though the choices were pretty obvious. It was my biofilter-passing theory, so I was doing the biofilter part. Rachel and Jake had excellent offensive morphs and Ax had yeerk expertise and the advantage of actually being the species our enemies thought that we were, so they were coming. But the most important decision was in who wasn't coming. Everything else was really ad-hoc justification for the fact that Tobias, who had been down into that nightmare before and gotten trapped, who was nervous about morphing and had better reason than any of us to fear the Pool, would stay on the surface for the guard mission. And Marco, who had been so adamant about not morphing tapeworms or anything else that were kind of close to the morphs we'd ended up with, would stay with him. Technically, the old woman probably only needed one guard. But nobody had protested the doubling up.

“This is a nice place,” Marco commented, glancing about the kitchen. “I wonder if Controllers get some kind of pension bonus.”

<You think the aliens have a special pension plan?> Tobias asked.

“Hey, they have special alien health insurance. Remember how little sense that made at first?”

Rachel met my eyes for a brief second before heading into the lounge room. I checked that nobody would notice my departure and followed her. “You okay?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Eh. War. You don't look so great.”

“Nightmares.”

“Ah.” She shook her head. “Anything interesting happen?”

 _You got eaten alive by ants_. “I dreamed about being in the jungle. It was pretty horrifying.”

“We've never fought in the jungle. Well, except for Jake's... time loop... memory... thing.”

“I know. That's the stupid part. Now my brain's just making stuff up. Or paying too much attention to Jake's Amazon stories.” I bit my lip. “Don't tell Jake though, he'll find some way to make it his fault. You? Anything horrifying?”

She glanced at me, paled, and looked quickly away. “You don't want to know,” she said quickly, and I believed her. “But I didn't bring you out here to talk about nightmares. I think... I mean, this plan. We kidnap the Controller and take her place, starve her yeerk, let her go, right?”

I nodded.

“Well you should probably... you know... make the phone call. I can't do it. I might slip up and he'd recognise me.”

'He'. Her father. “Are... are you sure?”

She shrugged. “He's already involved, right? Might as well make use of it. Give her a better chance of getting out safely.”

“Yeah,” I said. I hesitated. What was I supposed to say? 'Thank you'? She wasn't trying to do _me_ a favor; she was trying to save an elderly woman. Interpreting it as anything else would probably make her mad. “We'll save her,” I said. “And your cousin. And everyone.”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “We will.”

A key turned in the front door. We dashed back for the kitchen.

“She's here!” Rachel hissed.

“Places,” Jake whispered.

Marco and I dashed beneath the table, hiding under the tablecloth. Tobias hopped up on top of the cabinets and looked like a particularly tacky second-hand-shop knick-knack. Rachel and Jake backed into the next room, and Ax took his place against the wall next to the door to the living room, out of sight from the front door.

We heard the front door opening. Footsteps moving through the living room, into the kitchen.

Stopping, very suddenly.

<Do not move, yeerk,> Ax hissed.


	16. Chapter 16

Even with half of her face obscured by the makeshift blindfold, the woman looked terrified. Her knuckles were white as she clasped her bound hands together tightly, her lips pale where they pressed together. She sat rigid, motionless.

I crawled, very quietly, out from under the table.

<So you do not feel like speaking, yeerk?> Ax said. <That will change. You need to feed sometime within the next three days. Perhaps, when you become hungry, you will become more talkative.>

I gave Ax a nod and rested a couple of fingers very gently against her neck. She flinched away, but relaxed very slightly as I focused on her, focused on her form. Felt her DNA flowing into me.

She shouldn't understand what was happening, but just in case, Ax kept her distracted. <So nervous, yeerk. Perhaps you are not so brave after all. Let us start with your name. Mine is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. And yours?>

She remained silent. I backed slowly out of the room. Ax gave a mental sigh of mock disappointment.

<Well, perhaps we will try again later. For now, I have errands. Think on your position while I am gone, yeerk.> He trotted out of the room to meet up with Rachel and Jake, the sounds of his hooves clattering on tiles masking my own footsteps as I snuck behind him. All four of us exchanged glances and gave each other a nod. All four of us closed out eyes and focused.

Soon, I was an elderly woman, with three flies gathering on my wrist. I went to the bedroom to find some appropriate clothing.

<You did well, Ax,> Jake said.

<If you say so, Prince Jake,> was the reply.

<You're not happy.>

<I am... uncomfortable... with this aspect of the mission.>

<Yeah, I know – ticks are gross.>

<Not the ticks. The part I just undertook. It seems... cruel.>

<Maybe so,> Jake said gently, <but it was necessary. Soon, that woman will be free, and thankful for your intervention. I know I was, those three days you had a Dracon pointed at me. Don't let the yeerk fool you, Ax – she was probably laughing on the inside.>

<Yes, Prince Jake.> Ax did not sound convinced.

I pulled on a cardigan and skirt combo that I'd pulled out of the closet at random, strung up several small bags of dry instant oatmeal under the skirt, and checked for any suspicious bulges. Hmm, better add a coat to be safe. The old woman seemed pretty spry, all things considered. But then, it was a morph – how much of ageing did the morphing technology consider to be 'injury'? I had her wrinkles, her muscle definition, but if she had arthritis or any such thing, I wasn't feeling it. Everything about morphing seemed so frustratingly inconsistent. Maybe it was a question of perspective, like fooling the technology into thinking my morphing outfit was part of my body – I knew what I wanted to look like, but I instinctively thought of things like arthritis as injury. It was definitely something I should look further into.

The McDonald's wasn't that far away, and I made good time. I headed for the bathroom to refresh the morph while the others put on their tick bodies for the first time.

I had watched my friends turn into a lot of things. Very few of them were as disgusting to watch as the change into a tick.

Jake's mouth fused together and extended into a long tube with barbs sprouting from the edges. Two bulbous appendages grew out of his cheekbones. Rachel's whole body seemed to shrivel and bend, her legs and arms stiffening into tick legs, more shooting from her torso. A large bulb of pale flesh inflated on her back. And Ax... well, andalites look weird turning into anything. His limbs became long and spindly and many-segmented, and he collapsed under his own weight as his fur went white, then disappeared.

I decided it was better to close my eyes and focus on my own morph.

A few minutes later, I carefully scooped three ticks onto my sleeve. <Are you guys okay?> I asked.

<Yeah,> Jake said. <This little guy is... pretty calm, actually.>

<I am hungry,> Ax noted. <Is that normal?>

<Probably. Here we go.> I picked a tick and gently lifted its body with my thumb and forefinger, careful not to crush it. Tiny legs wriggled, searching for purchase; the little mouthparts searched for flesh to pierce, blood to drink. Eww.

I put the tick in my mouth. I lodged it high up above my teeth, where my gum met my cheek – where I couldn't accidentally chew it.

The second went on the other side of my mouth. The third went under my tongue.

<Is everyone okay?> I asked, trying not to sound grossed out.

<I believe I am secure,> Ax said.

<All good here, Cassie,> Jake assured me.

<Can we just get this over with?> Rachel snapped.

She had a good point. I made sure all my clothing was in the right place and my oatmeal didn't show, then went to line up. The line wasn't long – within a couple of minutes, I was at the counter.

“What can I get you?” a tired-looking teenager asked me.

I did my best to memorise his face, and the name on his nametag. Stan. “A happy meal, with extra happy.” The ticks didn't impede my speech, but they felt really weird in my mouth. I clamped down on the urge to rip them out.

Stan gave me a tight, unamused smile and tilted his head slightly. I got out of line and slipped around the back, taking the same route we'd followed the woman on three days ago. I nodded to the young woman who let me into the freezer, stepped toward the little room with the Gleet Biofilter, and pressed my lips tightly together. <Moment of truth, guys.>

<Remember, Cassie, if the alarm goes off, get out. Don't wait around to test the Dracon.>

<I know, Jake. Let's keep the flirting-with-death to a minimum and all.>

That would have been the perfect moment for Marco to say something unfunny and sarcastic, but since he was busy making sure an elderly captive didn't die or escape, nobody spoke as I stepped through the doorway. A tingle passed over me as I moved through the Biofilter. <Do you guys feel it?>

<I felt nothing,> Jake said.

<Good.> I waited about ten seconds anyway, tensed for an alarm. It never came. <It worked. I think it worked!>

<Good work, Cassie. Now get us into the Pool.>

I pushed open the door at the far end of the little room and immediately heard the too-familiar confirmation that we were heading to the Yeerk Pool – the faint echoes of human screams. They got louder as we moved down the stairs, until I could make out shouts of anger too, and then individual pleas. I kept my face blank, implacable. A Controller wouldn't be bothered. Not until they bent over that sludge and the alien slug wormed its way out of their ear...

_Don't look bothered, don't look bothered._

The stairs seemed to go on forever, until my old feet ached and my knees creaked. Maybe I _did_ have a touch of arthritis or something. Or... what else did women get with age? Osteoporosis?

The cries became more distinct. “No! Let me go! I am a free woman!”

I could see the end of the tunnel ahead, opening into the vast Yeerk Pool complex.

“I'm gonna tear your head off someday, you big bladed git!”

Face blank, I stepped forward through the doorway.

“Run, andalite! Get out of here!”

_What –_

And suddenly, horrible, dreadful malevolence descended around me all at once, slammed into my mind. I instinctively froze, which was lucky, because if I had've bolted, I would have run straight through the tailblade that was suddenly at my throat.

<Hello, andalite bandit,> Visser Three said.


	17. Chapter 17

Dammit, I _hate_ being the Damsel in Distress.

<Is that Visser three?!> Jake asked. <What is going on?!>

<Abomination!> Ax hissed.

<Guys, let me handle this,> I said, with a lot more confidence than I felt. Aloud, I stammered, “Visser, I don't... I don't understand...”

<Do not take me for a fool, andalite. You thought that you could defeat the Gleet Biofilter by coming alone? There is only one situation in which one of our hosts would come down here without their yeerk, andalite. And that is if they are you.>

Okay, so we'd made some pretty fundamental mistakes, it seemed. Stupid of me to assume that any problem picked up would result in an alarm that we could hear.

<He thinks Cassie is alone,> Jake said. <Everyone else stay quiet. We might still get the element of surprise.>

Visser Three, apparently satisfied that I couldn't run away all that fast in my current morph, pulled his tail away and walked around in front of me. Several Dracon beams were pointed in my direction. I stayed frozen.

<Which are you, then?> he asked. <You are not Aximili. And yet, you seemed happy enough to speak with me to try to maintain your cover. I suppose your arrogance in wishing to avoid conversing with an _abomination_ has loopholes, hmm? >

I met his main eyes, and kept silent.

<Hmm. I do not think that you are the leader, the one who prefers the striped beast. Perhaps you are the one who likes his wings. Or the large dog one.>

It was a good thing that the Visser's aura of paralysing terror was keeping me from feeling much else; it helped me control my expression. Silent, face blank, I aimed to give nothing away.

<Prideful even in the face of certain defeat, it seems. So typical as to become boring, when you have killed as many andalites as I. But an idea strikes me; you have caused so much worry to my troops that I believe they are entitled to a little fun in compensation, do you not agree?>

Without looking away from the Visser's main eyes, I raised my hands. His stalk eyes immediately focused upon them. The woman's hands were even clumsier at signing than my own, lacking practice; a fortunate detail, since if I had've been using andalite hands he would have known immediately that I wasn't a native speaker. The ill shape of human fingers obscured my amateur use of them as I twisted them into a sign that I had seen Aximili make on occasion, often with a vicious, emotive twist and a shot of mental disgust. Two forefingers and a thumb, _Va_ – a baseline concept of 'good' or 'standard' that underlays many andalite natural concepts. The last fingers looping around each other, _an_ – an abbreviated version of 'soul' or 'person'. In the middle, a pair of fingers pushing viciously into it, a symbol of breaking, of dischord, of perversion, bisecting the word, corrupting the sign and its pronunciation into something that didn't flow well with the rest of the language. _Vagidan_.

Abomination.

The Visser's eyes narrowed. <Well, no matter. You will speak soon enough.> He twitched an eyestalk, and a pair of hork-bajir stepped forward to grab me. Instinctively, I tried to hit one, which had absolutely no effect, although the Visser found it amusing. The pair grabbed me, lifted me off the ground, and dragged me forward, towards the middle of the cavern.

Towards the yeerk pool.

They moved fast, but the yeerk pool complex is really, really massive; stadium massive. I had time. We could've been running full speed and I would have had time.

Alright. What else did I have?

My secret identity. A drawback; I couldn't morph. A whole bunch of oatmeal under my skirt; the guards half-carrying me had to have felt the bulk but apparently didn't know enough about humans to think it was weird. A secret mouthful of anxious ticks. There had to be a way to use that.

What could I do? Last time I'd been in this situation, my answer had been suicide. I'd been rescued at the last minute. There was nobody to rescue me this time, and I couldn't give up, I couldn't take three of my friends with me. I _had_ to find a way out. There was no alternative.

Right, so, my normal plan wasn't ideal. I was quite possibly the worst Animorph for this mission. We should've sent in someone else. I glanced around; Visser Three and a dozen armed hork-bajir behind, two carrying me, the piers rapidly clearing but a few taxxons and hork-bajir milling about ahead...

Right, not an ideal Cassie situation. What would Rachel do?

<Rachel?> I asked.

Silence.

<Rachel! Guys, is Rachel okay?>

<She has not spoken in some time,> Ax noted, sounding concerned.

<I'm fine!> Rachel snapped. <What?>

Alright, definitely not okay. But that would have to wait. <Two hork-bajir are carrying me to the infestation pier, and I can't demorph in full view like this. I need an avenue of attack. Thoughts?>

<Why are you asking me? Fight! Take them by surprise, break away, find cover, _escape_ and break _out_! >

<How?>

<I don't know, I'm a small bug all cramped up with basically no air and trying not to be randomly squished! Figure it out!>

<Rachel,> Jake said in a tone that said 'back off'. <Cassie, what do you see?>

<What do I see? Sheds, Controllers, a Yeerk Pool. The usual.>

<Cassie,> Rachel said, much more restrained. <Find us a chance to get big, and we'll deal with this. No problem.>

Get big? I glared at the hork-bajir carrying me. We were in the open; there was nowhere for them to get...

<I might have something.>

<Then tell us,> Jake said.

I told them.

<Okay,> Rachel said, <I officially love this plan.>

<Of course you do,> Jake sighed.

I kicked one of the hork-bajir as hard as I could, twisted in his grip. The attack did absolutely nothing. I kicked him again, elbowed him, smacked him across the ear. He swatted me across the back of my head in irritation; spitting blood, I tried punching the other in the nose. I told the others, rapidly, what I was attempting to do just as they marched me down the pier, forced my head forward...

<Now?> Rachel asked.

<Not yet.> _Take them by surprise._ <I still have something I need to do.>

The thing about human muscles is, they're really, really strong. Much stronger than the bone that supports them. But humans usually can't use them at full power except in the most desperate circumstances, because doing so damages them beyond repair, as well as tearing them from bone and other nasty stuff. Of course, this is not such a problem when you have a nearly unlimited ability to heal.

And of course, when an alien telepath is forcing desperate fear into your brain, it's not that much of a nudge to make your body go into 'desperate circumstances' mode.

_Break away._

I had been a hork-bajir enough to have a pretty good idea of where to kick. My ankle and shin both shattered against the knee of one of my captors. He released me in shock. I dove forward, and while the hork-bajir might be ready for me to try to escape back off the pier, they weren't prepared for me launching myself into the Yeerk Pool.

_Find cover._

I pulled my coat up over my head to protect my ears from the wriggling, writhing slugs pushing against me from all directions in the sludge, and set to work opening the bags of oatmeal under my skirt. The Pool was already surrounded by Controllers, both hork-bajir and humans, pointing Dracon beams at me. But not firing. Why would they? I was trapped, and as far as they could tell, struggling to swim in the Pool. Why kill their own to get me, when I had to come out eventually?

The yeerks were pushing on me with _direction_ , I realised. It took me a moment to realise that they weren't acting under their own initiative; the open conceptual instructions that Visser Three was sharing for the benefit of the yeerks in the Pool were almost incomprehensible to me, and I almost missed them. But I garnered that he was ordering them to push me back forward the pier where my hork-bajir escort were waiting. And they did. I couldn't exactly struggle against the tide with a broken leg, but even if I could, I doubt it would have mattered. They pushed me against the pier, and a huge hork-bajir hand reached down. I flinched away. The Yeerk Pool was, at least temporarily, my protection, and I was in no condition to fight; if I could stop him from dragging me out until I had a chance to heal my leg, to put on fur and teeth...

But the hork-bajir didn't drag me out of the Pool. He put his hand around my neck.

And pushed me under.

Yeerks pressed against the coat over my head, trying to squeeze under, to find a way in while I struggled not to breathe in the foul sludge of the Yeerk Pool. Demorph, demorph... but what good would that do? What morph did I have that could live in a Yeerk Pool? Surely not eel or shark. Anything terrestrial was a waste of time, no bird would be able to fly soaked in yeerk sludge... I felt myself weakening.

The hork-bajir pulled me up, pulled my face out of the sludge. I looked straight into the cold, pitiless eyes of Visser Three.

<Report,> he said.

I spat out the blood welling in my mouth and stayed silent.

The hork-bajir pushed me under again, and as the yeerks struggled to get under my coat, I realised what was happening. This was a _game_. We'd caused one too many morale problems for the Yeerk Empire, and the Visser was making it up by _toying_ with me. It was a free-for-all – get the andalite host before it drowns.

I don't know why, but that made me more angry than anything.

I felt myself begin to weaken again and the hork-bajir pulled me up. Visser Three gave me a few seconds to gasp for air before once again calling <Report.> I wished I knew enough about yeerks to fake being a Controller. Instead, the hork-bajir pushed me under again.

<Now?> Rachel asked, impatiently.

<Give me a minute.> _Think, think_. Morph. I had to morph. But... I didn't know if the yeerks around me could sense what shape I was. If I demorphed and remorphed in the Pool, would they know I was human? They'd been around the Visser; at least some of them must know that I had to pass through my default form. Could yeerks see? I couldn't see anything under the surface of the Pool, but maybe they saw with Kandrona radiation or something. Of maybe they has some other sense I couldn't even fathom.

The hork-bajir pulled me up.

<Report.>

I pulled the coat tighter over my head and focused on Cassie as he pushed me back under. I struggled a little, mostly to hide the fact that my neck was getting smaller. I tried to control the morph so that the bottom half of my body demorphed completely without the top changing too much. And then I focused on horse.

My horse morph was probably the one I was most familiar with, even more so than wolf or osprey. I used my horse morph to experiment and practice new things. So I was very, very good at it. Turning the bottom half of my body into a horse was no difficulty at all, even as the hork-bajir pulled my head out of the sludge and Visser Three said once more, a slight impatient edge in his tone now, <Report.>

“Abomination,” I hissed in the most Ax-like way I could manage, and barely managed to gasp a breath before I was pushed under again. Hoping that whatever senses the yeerks had would assume my centaur form to be an andalite amongst the confusion of the Pool, I immediately started to demorph, again focusing on the lower half of my body first.

<I _will_ let you drown, you know, > the Visser informed me as my horse legs drew together and formed into human ones; I immediately focused on my next morph. My face and shoulders were still mostly the elderly woman, so far as I could tell, although the sludge should obscure any minor changes.

I waited until being pulled up one more time, another demand from Visser Three, before I demorphed the last of my features and then immediately morphed again.

<You okay, Ax?> I asked.

<Yes.>

<When you're ready, guys,> I said.

<Rachel?> Jake said.

<Now?>

<Now.>

The hork-bajir had to notice my neck thickening in his grasp, even through my struggles. I didn't give him time to think about it. I reached up with one bladed, muscular arm and used as much strength as I could muster to slice through the hand that was holding me.

The hork-bajir pulled back, howling. A finger floated down my chest as I pulled my head from the water and gasped for air. Both of the hork-bajir on the pier seemed to be having trouble, clawing at their faces; the one currently short a few fingers dug some of his remaining fingers into his left ear, while the other gouged at his nose. I used the distraction to pull myself out of the Pool, the tatters of a skirt and blouse still clinging to my blades. One of the oatmeal bags hung from my leg; I kicked it at the Visser. He caught it easily on his tail before it could hit him. I couldn't hang around to watch him inspect it, though; I was too busy running from the sudden Dracon fire, pushing past the two hork-bajir who clawed at their faces, reaching into my big hork-bajir mouth with one hand and very, very carefully pulling a tick out.

<You still alright, Ax?> I asked. For all I knew, hork-bajir blood might be toxic to ticks.

<I am fine. Demorphing now.> The tick began to grow larger in my hand. Ax was about the size of a baseball when I reached the cages.

The yeerks were smart enough not to shoot at me when I was in such close proximity to their caged hosts. It's not like I could do any more damage there than stray gunfire would. It did give me a brief reprieve while I grabbed at the bars of a cage on the end of a row with my free hand and, under the guise of simply using the prisoners as a shield, surreptitiously rolled Ax into the cage.

<Please protect him,> I told the people in the cage, transmitting a feeling of fierce protectiveness along with the request. They immediately shuffled forward to block the demorphing andalite from view as I swung on top of the cage.

<Oatmeal!> Visser Three bellowed furiously. <Oatmeal! Stay away from the Pool!> His eyes fixed on me.

Of course, up on top of the cage, with no valuable hosts in the way, I was fair game. The air once again filled with Dracon fire. I dashed to the edge of the cage and leapt as far as I could, away from the cages, in case some terrible shot managed to hit one of the hosts. I needed to draw their attention away from the rapidly demorphing Ax, and from the two incapacitated guards. Let the guards sneak off somewhere to deal with their sudden health complications.

A Dracon beam sliced through my tail, carving it off. I fell forward, dashed on all fours instead, until another cut off my arm. I fell forward onto my face.

“Visser, do we..?”

<Yes! Kill it!>

I rolled onto my side and stared at about two dozen points of imminent, certain death. But I'd made a difference, hadn't I? I'd accomplished the mission... and more importantly, I'd given the others a chance. Maybe they wouldn't die for my screwup.

Then I heard it. The bellow of an infuriated grizzly bear.

The roar of a tiger.

I could _feel_ their anger. I don't think they were doing it deliberately. I'd been trying to transmit feeling for months but I’d never achieved anything so clear. I could feel Jake's protective fear and Rachel's protective rage cut right into my mind and from the hesitation of every person in the vicinity, so could they. The tiger leapt from nowhere right into the crowd of Dracon-aiming Controllers, still covered in hork-bajir blood and bits of bone. Crawling into a hork-bajir's sinuses as a tick and demorphing inside them would do that.

Of course, having somebody demorph inside your ear is probably even more painful, so the blood coating Rachel's fur probably had a more grizzly story behind it. She roared and barrelled straight for Visser Three, who nimbly evaded her and put a deep score down her arm with his tailblade.

<Cass – >

<I'm fine!> I said quickly. <Can we get out of here?> I scrambled to my feet, did the smallest possible amount of demorphing and remorphing that would let me regrow a tail, and dashed into battle, immediately becoming indistinguishable from the hork-bajir-Controllers.

<Ax?> Jake asked.

<I am here,> Ax said. He sliced the lock on the door neatly with his tailblade and kicked it open. <We must find an exit.>

<Yeah, an exit would be good.> I hamstrung a hork-bajir who was about to lay Jake's throat open, then stepped back and blended into the crowd of attackers once more.

<I have one,> Ax said suddenly. <According to this host, there is an exit that comes out in the forest, behind a door that a bear should be able to overpower. Follow me.>

I located the blue streak cantering past. Hork-bajir don't see blue all that well compared to greens and browns, but it's hard to miss an andalite. I leapt in to help Jake and Rachel carve a path to follow.

Here's the thing about hork-bajir. Predators, like tigers and raptors and humans, know how to kill things. They had a natural instinct for it. Prey animals would also fight for dominance, or when cornered, or to protect their young. The concept that when the chips were down, there were two options – to attack or to run away – was so ingrained in our understanding of how organisms behaved that we has a phrase for it, 'fight or flight'. Some creatures were better at fighting, some were better at fleeing, but those were the choices that every animal made when it came to a real confrontation. But hork-bajir? They didn't seem to have any kind of 'fight' response. Oh, they could be taught to do it, much how a human could be taught to drive a car, but there was no instinctive reflex for it that I could find. The closest 'natural' thing that my hork-bajir mind could compare to the bloody battle I was engaging in was a bonding ritual, a dance where hork-bajir showed off their grace and control by sweeping blades past each other and _not_ doing any damage. The hork-bajir in me kept telling me to back away, to miss; it left me with the feeling that I was doing the dance very, very wrong.

But that aside, we had one major advantage in the battle – we were getting a lot better at fighting big groups. There were ways to make our small numbers work for us, although not having Marco or Tobias threw our dynamic off a little. We were a small force who knew how each other moved, knew what to do and when; the Controllers didn't seem to have that kind of intimate experience with each other, and spent a lot of time getting in each other’s way, cutting each other by accident, and hesitating while they expected somebody else to move in and attack. It didn't exactly make things even, but it meant that the math wasn't as simple as 'ten times as big an army is ten times as good'.

Besides, we healed. They didn't. Hosts were in short supply and a hork-bajir-Controller was a lot more reluctant to take a blade to the shoulder than we were.

It occurred to me that the force we were fighting seemed smaller, easier, than they had previously. Were we getting really good at fighting yeerks? Was morale in the invasion falling that much? Or was it the oatmeal, the addiction stealing their people and messing up their ranks? Even as I had the thought, a hork-bajir froze midway through slashing at me, screamed something in hork-bajir, and instead laid about her allies with both bladed arms.

As soon as it was obvious where we were headed, Controllers moved to bar our way. A blade swung through the neck of our sudden ally; her head bounced against the ground at my feet. Another blade cut into my one remaining arm and suddenly I couldn't lift it any more and then we were sandwiched between the Controllers we were running from and the Controllers barring our exit.

<If anyone else has any element of surprise left, this would be an excellent time for it,> Jake noted.

<I'm surprised we got this far,> I noted. <Does that count?>

<Oh no,> Rachel said, <I am _not_ dying down here. Not after all that. I just demorphed inside somebody's head. No way am I letting that be for nothing. >

“GET OFF OUR PLANET, YOU BASTARDS!”

The voice was vaguely familiar, human, and from behind us. It was quickly joined by others, human and hork-bajir; cries of outrage, of confusion, of pain. And the Visser's command, <Injure them as little as possible! Too many visible injuries would be a political nightmare for The Sharing!>

<I released several humans from their cages,> Ax explained.

The freed humans had started a sort of ragged chant. “Free Earth! Go home! Free Earth! Go home!” It was unsteady, wavering, because the chanters cut in and out randomly as they fought, ran, threw things, and struggled to open more cages.

They were few in number. They stood no chance in a real battle. But the yeerks seemed completely unprepared to deal with them. They had to stop and adjust their Dracon beams, which had been on high power to try to kill us, and many of the escapees were utterly fearless. A small girl with flowing black hair sprinted straight for a hork-bajir, screeching, and leapt up to try to claw his eyes out. It took the hork-bajir's entire attention to pull her off without scratching her on any of his blades, which was good, because it meant he didn't see Jake leaping for his throat from behind.

“That's for my mommy!” the little girl shouted, greenish blood splattering her face and hair. Jake backed quickly away.

I turned in time to see a moustached, distinguished-looking young man swing a large metal pipe at my head. I dodged and raised my remaining arm as high as it would go, spreading my palm. <Careful with that, I'm on your side.>

“Andalite?”

<Yes! We need an exit!>

He glanced over my shoulder, to the hork-bajir who were still blocking the exist we'd been aiming for.

“Rush the exit!” the man screamed, and it was immediately picked up as a battle cry.

“ _Rush the exit_!”

Somebody must have gotten a couple of the hork-bajir cages open, because humans and hork-bajir rushed together around us, straight at the enemy with no fear of death. The hork-bajir guarding the exit fired. People collapsed, nursing paralysed legs or crashing stunned to the ground; the remaining escapees simply leapt over them. Jake, Rachel, Ax and I leapt into the fray, moved over and around people, impossible to target in the mass of escapees that the guards had been ordered not to visibly injure. I wriggled through into the corridor and ran. Fleeing was something my hork-bajir brain knew how to do, although doing so into a dark, confined tunnel wasn't ideal. Ax leapt over me, taking the lead, a stolen Dracon beam at the ready. Rachel took the rear, using her bulk as a shield, while Jake slipped underneath me and picked me up off the ground. He seemed to have more limbs than I did, so I simply rode him through the tunnel as I demorphed and remorphed in the dark corridor, then slipped off to run behind. Were hosts escaping, down in the corridor behind us? I had no idea.

I couldn't see anything in the darkness. I heard somebody using a Dracon beam, smelled burning, and then Ax threw open the door and we were bathed in light. We burst out from under a tree, and I felt the tingle of a Gleet Biofilter as I crawled out. Behind us, the alarm went off, with its accompanying warning about closing one's eyes for the Biofilter.

<We're clear!> Jake said, relieved, as he leapt out of the ground.

He was, unfortunately, wrong.

There were several tents set up around us. A middle-aged man was turning meat on a little gas barbecue. A couple of hork-bajir stared at us as if they hadn't expected an andalite, a grizzly bear, a tiger and a hork-bajir to come bursting out of the ground in their midst, covered in blood. A little girl stared at us, wide-eyed. She couldn't have been older than seven or eight. I met her eyes, unable to process what was going on.

“ _Gafrash_!”

If the hork-bajir hadn't shouted as he leapt for me, I probably wouldn't have swatted him out of the air so easily. But as I hooked a blade into him and threw him down at my feet, I felt sudden, hot rage fire inside me. After everything, this? Really? We were _out_. We didn't have _time_ for this. My hork-bajir instincts were screaming at me that I was doing the ritual wrong as I threw him down, as he raised one arm and I used a shin-blade to slice his shoulder open.

I raised my arm.

<Let's go!> Jake called. <We don't want another fight here! Come on!>

My comrades were already disappearing into the forest. I followed them, a new coat of hork-bajir blood fresh on my forearm and thighs.

I've gone over that scene in my head many times, step by step. The rage – no, the _irritation_ – at the ridiculous attack. Throwing my attacker to the ground, disabling him. Bringing my wrist-blade down against the prone hork-bajir's throat in a one-strike execution. His blood, spurting over me, watering the grass. Every time I go over it, I'm certain I've remembered every detail correctly, but every time I go over it, I think they're different. And I'm never sure – I'm never sure if I brought that blade down _before_ the order to retreat, or _after_.


	18. Chapter 18

I knew the area. We were close to my farm. Not super close, but within walking distance for a wolf. We split up to be more difficult to track, and I headed for the river, demorphed on the bank and stripped off my morphing suit. I splashed water over myself to scrub the sticky blood away. The water was moving too fast to safely get in and bathe, so I had to drag it up handfuls at a time, run it down my arms, over my face, through my hair. It was too dark to be sure, but the mud around me must be blue-green with the blood. The chilled mud caked on my feet but I didn't dare dip them in the water. I just moved down the bank a little. If I was going to be covered in mud, it could at least be mud that didn't carry the evidence of my crimes.

I sluiced the water off my body as best I could, trying not to think about the blades that had just coated it and what I'd been using them for. I put my morphing outfit on, trying not to think about how I'd wash out the blood that had managed to stain it. I focused on the wolf within me, hid my body in thick fur and my mind in a simpler set of priorities. I went home.

My parents, of course, were worried.

“Where were you?” my mother asked sternly as I trooped into the house in a set of emergency morph clothing I kept in the barn.

“Exercising Midnight,” I lied. “I'm sorry if I worried – ”

“Your father just went to check on Midnight,” my mother said sweetly.

Dammit.

“Cassie, we've been trying to give you your space. I know being a teenager is hard. But you can't keep running off and doing god-knows-what. You're going to get in trouble. You could be hurt or... worse... and we wouldn't know.”

I almost laughed at that. I almost laughed right in her face. And I knew I should feel shocked at that urge. I loved my mother, I respected her. But she was one hundred per cent right for completely the wrong reasons.

I knew she'd been worried about me. And I didn't care.

“I'm sorry,” I mumbled.

She sighed. “I really think you should think about that counsellor again. Or another one. Talk to _someone_.”

“I'm fine, Mom,” I assured her. “Really.”

“Fine? You're out at all hours, you don't seem to care about your grades or the animals any more – ”

“Hey, I've been taking great care of the animals!”

“Yes, I know. I know you have. But you don't seem to like it as much as you did. And it's okay to outgrow things, but if you're having trouble... handling things...”

Handling things? If I was having trouble _handling things?!_ I forced down the sudden irritation – I had to, because I had to lie to my parents, it was a matter of life and death. But I could just about explode right then, with the moral confusion and the disgust at my own species that I knew was really just displaced disgust at myself and the irritation at all these people getting in my way and the kind of detached wariness at the big, dark pit that seemed to swallow it all and wasn't scary, was just expansive, but that I knew was dangerous; a big nothing that was at the same time empty and full of pressure and both crushing me and tearing me apart like a kind of emotional zero-space...

And right there, in the middle of the kitchen, everything I'd locked down and clamped together under all that pressure crystallised into a single, diamond truth, perfect and transparent and finally undeniable; one fact, one thing, that took all of the confusion and locked it inside itself. I could no longer deny it; the single, hard fact that everything boiled down to.

I'd been fighting this war a long time. I'd been fighting this war hard and desperate for nearly ten per cent of my life.

And now, it seemed, the war had won.

“I'm fine. It won't be a problem.” I spoke the words as I thought them, giving me no time to consider. “I should have a lot more free time and a lot less stress soon.” I smiled at her, and I was pretty sure – pretty sure – that the smile was genuine. “I'm quitting the environmental group. I can focus more on my grades and spend more time with you guys.” I headed for my room, fully expecting her to call me back any second. But she didn't. And soon I was alone in my room, comforted by a single certainty that I hadn't been certain of five minutes ago, but that I now knew was the only possible way forward.

I was quitting the Animorphs.


End file.
